Bug 93408 – evms support in current baselayout is buggy and can prevent the system from booting

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description Mike Nerone 2005-05-21 02:26:04 UTC]

I'm using sys-apps/baselayout-1.9.4-r6. evms_activate is called in checkfs, but that's too late if the root filesystem is under evms management as well. My solution to this up to now has been to doctor /lib/udev-state/devices.tar.bz2 (RC_DEVICE_TARBALL) so as to include my evms entries. The need to do that is bad enough, but I swallowed the pill.

A couple of days ago, I had occasion to temporarily put an extra drive in this computer (to pull some data off of it for a friend whose Windows box had died). After removing his drive, my system would no longer boot. After some help from the evms-devel list, I realized that the source of the problem was that devices.tar.bz2 had been updated while my friend's drive was in the machine, and evms was freaking out because of the extra entries there. I booted to single-user and re-doctored devices.tar.bz2, fixing the problem.

Another Gentoo user on the list suggested modifying /etc/init.d/checkroot to do an evms_activate before fsck'ing the root partition. I did this, and it works perfectly, and I don't even need the RC_DEVICE_TARBALL at all anymore, and /dev/evms will always be up up-to-date from now on no matter how I move drives around.

Unfortunately, in general, if someone is going to get bitten by this bug, it will probably be at the worst possible time, because it will happen when drives are being moved around, most likely in response to a crashed drive (thankfully, *I* was lucky, and it coincidentally coincided with nothing important :P). The fix is simple, and I'll provide a patch following.

Note: I noticed that it looks like volume management is being handled differently in ~arch baselayout versions. At a glance, it looked like all evms_activate-ing has been removed, which scares me. The RC_VOLUME_ORDER variable that's been added to /etc/conf.d/rc makes me think there's some new magic that's gonna be at work here, but just in case: *Puhleez* don't break evms on me. :P

[Comment 1 Mike Nerone 2005-05-21 02:29:12 UTC]

Created attachment 59444 [details, diff]
Patch to /etc/init.d/checkroot to support root partition on EVMS

Also, I believe that the EVMS Support section in /etc/init.d/checkfs can be
safely removed, since putting this in checkroot means that evms_activate will
already have been executed while the final /dev directory is mounted (whether
using udev or devfs).

[Comment 2 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2005-05-21 03:20:18 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 50711 ***