Bug#917607: udev 240 Makes System Unbootable; rootfs Not Found

[Leo L. Schwab]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2019 at 04:50:51PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 31.12.18 um 00:04 schrieb Leo L. Schwab:
> > 	'lsmod' prints nothing.  /proc/modules is empty.
> > 
> >> ls -la /dev
> > 
> > 	No block devices appear to be listed.  (Screen photos available upon
> > request.)
> 
> Hm, this is very strange.
> Block devices such as /dev/sd? are directly created by the kernel and
> made available via devtmpfs. Mounting /proc and /dev is one of the first
> things done in
> /usr/share/initramfs-tools/init
> way before systemd-udevd is started.
> If you have no block devices at all, I'm at a loss what's going wrong.
> 
	What's going wrong is that there are no kernel modules loaded,
including 'ahci' which runs the SATA bus.

	Just for laughs, I re-installed udev 240-2 and rebooted.  As before,
the boot failed, leaving me at an initramfs prompt.  'lsmod' reported no
kernel modules loaded, and the directory /dev/disk did not exist.

	I then ran 'modprobe ahci' at the command prompt, and immediately
heard some brief chattering from the disks.  I then found the /dev/sd*
devices had been created, and the /dev/disk tree had been populated,
including /dev/disk/by-uuid.  'lsmod' now reported sd_mod, sr_mod, cdrom,
ahci, libahci, libata, and scsi_mod as loaded.

	So, something that used to trigger kernel module loading isn't
happening anymore.

	BTW, my rootfs is not encrypted, so 'cryptsetup' isn't involved.

					Schwab