[Bug 251164] Re: boot impossible due to missing initramfs failure hook / event driven initramfs

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 02:15:10PM -0000, Phillip Susi wrote:
> mdadm is event driven via udev.  The special part in the initramfs is
> the failure hook so that a degraded array will only be activated after a
> timeout.  I'm not sure if we want to auto degrade arrays post boot, but
> I suppose if we did, we could move that logic from the failure hook to
> the udev rule.

It can't be done in a udev rule.  Udev rules have a short timeout of their
own, after which the outstanding process will be killed.  The handling has
to be passed off to something else - such as an upstart job.

> What confuses me is cryptsetup.  I see that there is an upstart job that
> appears to try and prompt for the password and unlock the device, but as
> an upstart task, it has no stdin/out, so that prompt can't work.

The upstart job talks to plymouth.  The initramfs script *also* talks to
plymouth.

> After the system goes multi user you can no longer do a console password
> prompt.  If you want an interactive prompt at that point, you will need
> something that can interact with the X desktop, and anything that does
> that obviously isn't going in the initramfs.

The client-side logic is the same; what we're missing is a way to let
cryptsetup do plymouth interaction with something on the desktop after X is
started.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251164

Title:
  boot impossible due to missing initramfs failure hook / event driven
  initramfs

Status in “cryptsetup” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “mdadm” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  the cryptsetup package needs proper integration into the initramfs
  failure hooks

  The system must not assume a particular layered setup or sequence of
  appearance of (hotplug/udev/crypt/md/degraded-md/lvm) devices.

  It must be able to boot with any possible combination raid, lvm, crypt
  combination that the debian-installer can produce.

  
  Description of solution in comment #15

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