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Since upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to 14.10, one of my VGs doesn't come online when the system boots up, and unfortunately, this VG has my root FS, thus I'm dropped to the initrd BusyBox prompt.

Previously I had the issue that the VG needed more time to come online at boot, thus I added rootdelay=300 to the kernel argument list, and although the boot process hanged for some time, the VG eventually came online. But after the release upgrade, my VG never comes up. In the BusyBox prompt, lvm lvscan tells me they are inactive. I can activate them manually and proceed with the boot process, but as it is a server, it is really bad that it requires human interaction to properly boot up.

I suspect something's wrong with the new kernel, vmlinuz-3.16.0-23-generic. When I boot with the old kernel from before the release upgrade (vmlinuz-3.13.0-37-generic), it works fine.

I have 2 VGs on the system:

root@vmhost:~# vgs
  VG        #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  vmdata-vg   1  21   3 wz--n- 903.57g 7.34g
  vmhost-vg   2   2   0 wz--n-  52.09g 7.34g

The first one has only 1 PV, it comes up immediately. The second one has 2 PVs, has my root LV, and it contains mirrored LVs. I don't understand why vmhost-vg is not activated at boot time.

I already tried to add the following line to /etc/lvm/lvm.conf:

auto_activation_volume_list = [ "vmhost-vg", "vmdata-vg" ]

But unfortunately, it has no effect. (Yes, I run update-initramfs -u to propagate it into the initrd.)

I've already found other related questions and solutions on the Internet, but they are not applicable for me – others seem to use software RAID with mdadm, and their proposed solutions usually involve some tweaking with their RAID config. But this is not applicable for me, as I don't use any kind of RAID. My PVs are on plain /dev/sd* partitions.

1 Answer 1

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i saw a similar issue, and stumbled onto this:

if lvmetad(8) is enabled, the lvm2-activation-generator exits immediately without generating any systemd units and LVM2 fully relies on event-based activation to activate the LVM2 volumes

-- https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man8/lvm2-activation-generator.8.html

indeed setting use_lvmetad=0 in lvm.conf fixed the issue for me.

i did not investigate why the udev method is not working.

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    in which section of lvm.conf use_lvmetad should be?
    – QkiZ
    Dec 15, 2022 at 18:22

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