/sbin/mkinitrd in mkinitrd-3.4.43-1 contains code that looks like this: awk '/^md[0-9][0-9]*[ ]*:/ { print $4 }' /proc/mdstat Unfortunately, it appears that the version of awk in gawk-3.1.2-1 refuses to read any data from a file if stat on the file returns a size of 0: $ awk '/^md[0-9][0-9]*[ ]*:/ { print $4 }' /proc/mdstat $ cat /proc/mdstat | awk '/^md[0-9][0-9]*[ ]*:/ { print $4 }' raid1 raid1 raid1 raid1 $ Now, it could be argued that this is a bug in gawk, and indeed, I think I'll file a bug report about it, but still, I think it would be best for mkinitrd to be resilient in the face of this problem by using the "cat" technique shown above. I'll attach a patch.
Created attachment 91071 [details] feed /proc/mdstat into awk with cat
No, this is gawk being busted and needing to be fixed, not something that should be worked around in mkinitrd
3.1.2-2 has a fix in it. Please reopen if that does not work for you. Thanks a lot for this bug-report, Florian La Roche