Description of problem: My fstab contains the following: LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1 / is physically /dev/mapper/vg_h_0-lv_h_root, so an initrd needs LVM support. The following code in mkinitrd: elif ! echo $rootdev | cut -c1-6 |grep -q "LABEL=" ; then explicitly refuses to add LVM support to the initrd if the fstab uses LABEL= syntax. Hence, initrds built by mkinitrd cause a kernel panic on boot, since the root partition cannot be found/mounted. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): mkinitrd-4.2.1.10-1.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Upgrade kernel 2. Reboot 3. Actual results: Kernel panic Expected results: Successful boot Additional info: This can luckily be worked around by manually re-running mkinitrd, as follows: root_lvm=1 mkinitrd ... since luckily mkinitrd doesn't clear out root_lvm by default (which I would consider a bug - using uninitialized variables - but it's useful in this case!)
I can confirm this bug still exists in RHEL 4 ES U5. I ran into it last week; specify root as "LABEL=/" in /etc/fstab; watch mkinitrd skip lvm-specific steps like copying {lvm.static, lvm.conf} and including more than only the dm-mod module. It seems to me that bugs #209473, #212124, #214184, #246626, #327181 and #426671 are related to this (not sure if they're strictly dupes).