Description of problem: When booting a system where /var is mounted from a separate file system, which you may want to do if your / is mounted read-only as one of many possibilities, you will see: /var/lock/lvm: mkdir failed: Read-only file system The problem is that at this moment /var indeed is yet read-only but lvm does not care. Well, /var could be located conceivably on some LVM volume. Interestingly enough this message is not showing up with lvm2-2.01.12-1.0 from the current rawhide but this does not say anything that /var/lock/lvm will be created and I do not know if existing volume groups would be found if such indeed would exist. All of this despite that '--ignorelockingfailure' flag was given. Removing lvm2, even if it not really used and despite of "if [ -x /sbin/lvm.static ]; then ..." in rc.sysconfing, is not really an option. 'yum remove lvm2' comes back with a proposition to basically remove the whole system. :-) The only possible hack would be to rename /sbin/lvm.static which would have to be traced through every update. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): lvm2-2.01.08-2.1 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: The easiest way to reproduce the condition is to do mount -o ro -t tmpfs none /var/lock /sbin/lvm.static vgchange -a y --ignorelockingfailure umount /var/lock On FC4 this responds with "/var/lock/lvm: mkdir failed: Read-only file system". I guess that the easiest thing would be to "2>/dev/null" in a corresponding place of rc.sysinit but I have no idea if this is really a correct course of action.
Having /var be a separate partition is by no means a rare configuration.
The error message should be suppressed nowadays. (Please reopen if there are still problems.)