Hi,
I am using Raspberry Pi OS Release ‘bookworm’ on a Raspberry Pi 5. The OS runs on an NVMe; an SD card is not installed.
I partitioned the NVMe so that after installation with the Raspberry Pi Imager, the rootfs is only 8 GB in size, after which nothing is occupied. I have already installed countless Pis this way without any problems.
A few days ago, I created a new partition on one of these installations and set it up for LVM. Since then, the Pi no longer boots because it gets stuck in initrd at the point where the mount points from LVM should be mounted. The initrd then goes into panic mode, and when I log in as root, I immediately see the problem: no ‘vgchange -ay’ was executed in initrd. If I do this manually and then press CTRL-D, the system boots up correctly.
I know that this was sometimes a problem “in the past” with Debian, but I haven't encountered the LVs not being set to active in the initrd for years. In the past, I added code to the initrd hooks myself to force this.
Incidentally, I had all initrds regenerated, assuming that mkinitramfs recognizes that LVM is being used and integrates the corresponding code (and the tools for LVM).
What is the secret in the Raspberry Pi OS release that causes the LVMs to be recognized automatically and set to ‘active’?
Many thanks & best regards,
Meinhard
I am using Raspberry Pi OS Release ‘bookworm’ on a Raspberry Pi 5. The OS runs on an NVMe; an SD card is not installed.
I partitioned the NVMe so that after installation with the Raspberry Pi Imager, the rootfs is only 8 GB in size, after which nothing is occupied. I have already installed countless Pis this way without any problems.
A few days ago, I created a new partition on one of these installations and set it up for LVM. Since then, the Pi no longer boots because it gets stuck in initrd at the point where the mount points from LVM should be mounted. The initrd then goes into panic mode, and when I log in as root, I immediately see the problem: no ‘vgchange -ay’ was executed in initrd. If I do this manually and then press CTRL-D, the system boots up correctly.
I know that this was sometimes a problem “in the past” with Debian, but I haven't encountered the LVs not being set to active in the initrd for years. In the past, I added code to the initrd hooks myself to force this.
Incidentally, I had all initrds regenerated, assuming that mkinitramfs recognizes that LVM is being used and integrates the corresponding code (and the tools for LVM).
What is the secret in the Raspberry Pi OS release that causes the LVMs to be recognized automatically and set to ‘active’?
Many thanks & best regards,
Meinhard
Statistics: Posted by meinhards — Sat Aug 16, 2025 6:03 pm