Hi,

I had another "simple" server upgrade from Devuan Ascii to Devuan Beowulf, these are the details and my work around for the problem.


There was nothing particularly special about this server, it doesn't use encrypted file systems; it started out life as a Debian Wheezy installation, migrated to Devuan Jessie and
later to Devuan Ascii and now Beowulf.


The server has /boot on it's own RAID1 partition with another RAID1 volume for the rest of the disk being an LVM2 volume group having a number of logical volumes for root, swap,
/usr/, /var/, /home/ and more.


After the dist-upgrade, it failed to boot and remained at the ministrants shell environment after having complained about not being able to find the /usr file system via it's UUID.

    It had another error as well which was fixed by allocating 25% to RUNSIZE variable (up from 10%) in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf

        - it was unable to find "rm" when running the boot up scripts before dumping itself to the initramfs shell.

Once at the initramfs prompt after fixing the first problem, I was able to do the following:

    (initramfs) lvm

        lvm> vgchange -ay

        lvm> exit

    (initramfs) exit

And then the server would continue to boot properly.


_The second fix, which I consider to be "clunky", was to adjust the /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/lvm2 file, adding in a line near the bottom as highlighted_

    activate "$ROOT"
    *activate "/dev/mapper/vg0-usr"*
    activate "$resume"

Then I rebuilt the initramfs in the usual way.

    update-initramfs -u -k all

The original lvm2 script specifically only activated the root file system (/dev/mapper/vg0-root), even though /usr (/dev/mapper/vg0-usr) was in the exact same volume group as a
separate file system, thus stopping boot from succeeding as expected.

    Other volumes come online in due course okay.

All was good with subsequent reboots.


Now, cludge or clunky, this was required because the /usr file system was [and continues to be] separate to the root file system and the initramfs only cared to enable the root
file system, leaving all other logical volumes as being "NOT AVAILABLE", including /usr which was definitely required!


Have I fixed this appropriately, or should I some how fix it another way?


Kind Regards
AndrewM