Bug#735935: grub2: LVM trouble at boot after upgrade to 2.02 beta

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Package: grub-pc
Version: 2.02~beta2-3

Hi Colin,

I have the strangest issue which I am not even entirely confident is a 
GRUB issue, but it started right after upgrading my system to GRUB 2.02 
from experimental, and without other changes, and it's even reproducible 
when running my system inside kvm off a thumbdrive, so I'm going to 
provisionally blame it on the GRUB 2.02 beta build.

I'm running a pretty standard LVM setup -- there's other stuff on this 
hard disk (like the preinstalled Windows), but one of the MS-DOS 
partitions is an LVM PV, containing a VG named "leveret", containing two 
LVs named "root" and "swap". /boot itself is located on the "root" LV. 
Every time I start up, since the upgrade, the initramfs fails to find my 
root hard disk via its /dev/disk/by-uuid path, and dumps me to a shell. If 
I look inside /dev/mapper, I see a node for "leveret-swap" but not 
"leveret-root". `lvm lvs` happily lists both nodes, though, and I can get 
my system to boot if I do `lvm vgchange -an`, `lvm vgchange -ay` (at which 
point both nodes appear, as well as the by-uuid symlink), and `exit`. 
(Resume-from-hibernate even worked after doing this, right after the 
upgrade.) There's nothing particularly suspicious-sounding in dmesg at any 
point.

The machine is a Toshiba L635 laptop, a few years old, BIOS boot only, 
running a somewhat out-of-date Debian testing, amd64. I'm running 
linux-image-3.9-1-amd64 3.9.8-1 (from testing this past summer or so) and 
lvm2 2.02.95-7. I'm happy to try to upgrade these, but since I haven't 
upgraded anything else on the system for a few weeks, I figured I'd report 
this and leave the system alone in case you had more questions about the 
current setup.

Let me know if you need any more information from me or want me to try 
anything. I'm at a bit of a loss how GRUB could have caused this, but I 
don't have any other ideas what's going on.

Thanks,
-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
https://ldpreload.com
geofft at ldpreload.com