Latest initramfs-tools from FAI repo breaks Ubuntu

[Michael Prokop]

* Robert Markula <robert.markula at gmx.net> [Mon Apr 05, 2010 at 07:24:44PM +0200]:

> since the end of this week (I can't tell the exact date/time, since I've
> not been working on the network here; must have been somewhere around
> the 1st of april) I suddenly couldn't boot my Ubuntu 9.10 karmic
> machines anymore. Grub2 would hang with the error message:

> <snip>
> /scripts/init-top/brltty: 19: grep: not found
> svgalib: Cannot open /dev/mem.

> Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems
> - Boot args (cat /proc/cmd/line)
>   - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
>   - Check root= (did the system wait the right device?)
> - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules;ls /dev)
> Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/............
> </snip>

> The first two lines variated from machine to machine (i.e.
> "/scripts/init-premount/lvm2: 39: add_mountroot_fail_mode: not found").

> Currently I'm not using FAI productively, i.e. I'm performing manual
> installs, then running a cascade of cfengine scripts; so I suspected the
> errors to be within these scripts somewhere.

> Until today when I did a fresh install, ran apt-get update && apt-get
> dist-upgrade and did a reboot. The reboot worked fine until I let
> cfengine do its thing, which consists of, among others, adding the fai
> repositories and doing an apt-get update again. In the logs I could see
> that one package is updated - 'initramfs-tools' has been updated from
> the FAI repositories, after which a reboot fails with the above error.
> The corpus delicti in this case is 'initramfs-tools 0.93.4-grml02'.

> So without the initramfs-tools from FAI, boot works, but with the
> initramfs-tools from FAI, boot breaks.

Can you reproduce the issue with
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/i/initramfs-tools/initramfs-tools_0.93.4_all.deb
as well?

initramfs-tools 0.94 should hit the pool soon (already uploaded and
being processed), would be great if you could give it a shot then as
well (because 0.93.4-grml02 is based on the git tree that's known as
initramfs-tools 0.94).

For debugging reasons:

* what does your /proc/cmdline look like?

* it would be great if you could boot with kernel options
  "verbose=1 debug=1" and provide us the resulting log

regards,
-mika-
-- 
http://michael-prokop.at/  || http://adminzen.org/
http://grml-solutions.com/ || http://grml.org/
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