Bug 2058386

Note In Rhel 9 the LVM filter will not used by default the system.devices file will be. see man lvmdevices and  man vgimportdevices.

Could you please provide us logs. You can find them in /tmp/*log in the installation environment or /var/log/anaconda/*log after the installation.

I'm reassigning this issue to LVM because the issue is not with Anaconda but LVM itself.

The customer facing the issue has a IMSM RAID configured in the BIOS on disks sda and sdb.
He **doesn't** use the IMSM RAID for the OS tree, but only /home, which is the condition to make the issue happen.
The OS tree is on another disk (a NVME disk).

When installing the system and rebooting, the /home partition is NOT being mounted, causing Emergency to be entered.
This happens because, due to /home not being part of the critical OS tree, dracut **didn't** include "mdraid" dracut module in the initramfs, which is **expected behaviour** (/home is not required to mount the / on /sysroot).

Due to having a IMSM RAID, LVM **hijacks** the partition hosting /home and seen in the initramfs phase as /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1.
This creates a "Duplicated PVs" warning and prevents /home from being mounted after switch root.

The issue is clearly on LVM side which considers /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1 as "normal partitions" **even though** they are on a IMSM RAID (which cannot be mounted in the initramfs due to absence of "mdraid" dracut module).
LVM needs to be smarter and has built-in code to detect the IMSM RAID and ignore such partition.


REPRODUCER:

You don't need a real IMSM hardware here, just a QEMU/KVM with 3 disks:
- /dev/vda for OS tree
- /dev/sda and /dev/sdb configured as IMSM RAID and hosting "/home"

Reproducer kickstart in attachment (bz2058386.ks). Due to not having real IMSM hardware, a hack is made. If you have real hardware, remove the "export IMSM_NO_PLATFORM=1" line.

REPRODUCER STEPS:

1. Install the system with the kickstart
2. Upon reboot, STOP at Grub menu and add "rd.break"
3. Check that devices for "/home" were "hijacked" by LVM

-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
switch_root:/# lvm lvs
  WARNING: Not using device /dev/sdb1 for PV 8tbqAB-ihqI-G4dZ-hyRt-hL32-mwqp-WrsbvS.
  WARNING: PV 8tbqAB-ihqI-G4dZ-hyRt-hL32-mwqp-WrsbvS prefers device /dev/sda1 because device was seen first.
  LV   VG   Attr       LSize  Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  home data -wi-------  1.99g                                                    
  root rhel -wi-ao---- 10.00g                                                    
  swap rhel -wi-a-----  2.00g                                                    
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------

4. Continue the boot, system will end up in Emergency mode

-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
[FAILED] Failed to start LVM event activation on device 8:1.
See 'systemctl status lvm2-pvscan@8:1.service' for details.
[FAILED] Failed to start LVM event activation on device 8:17.
See 'systemctl status lvm2-pvscan@8:17.service' for details.

[   ***] A start job is running for dev-mapp…ta\x2dhome.device (29s / 1min 30s)

...
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------

5. On non-real IMSM hardware, you can configure the IMSM Raid as shown below, but it won't be mountable anyway since LVM hijacked the devices and sees **duplicated PVs**

-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------
# export IMSM_NO_PLATFORM=1
# mdadm --assemble --scan
-------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< ---------------- 8< --------

Created attachment 1889348 [details]
Kickstart to reproduce

Works fine with 8.6