initramfs can't import any LUKS pools at boot on Debian Wheezy

[chungy]

I've got my laptop running Debian Wheezy and ZFS. At boot time, "zpool import" will not find any pools to import and I need to manually run touch /etc/mtab (creates the file, empty) to make it work.

I tried to add a touch "$DESTDIR/etc/mtab" to /usr/share/initramfs/hooks/zfs without success. I don't know what went wrong and I haven't done a whole lot of investigating into it.

I don't think it's related but for completeness, my disk consists of a LUKS partition and a 100MiB unencrypted ext4 /boot at the end; ZFS lives within the LUKS partition.

[micw]

I had the same problem (indeed there are 2 problems). First, /etc/mtab must be pressent. Second, zfs must be initialized then.

You can fix this by the following initrd script (just run the commands below to create it):

echo "ln -s -f /proc/mounts /etc/mtab" > /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount/zfs-fix-mw
echo "zpool status" >> /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount/zfs-fix-mw
chmod 700 /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount/zfs-fix-mw
update-initramfs -u -k

[FransUrbo]

The current initrd script already creates the mtab file before issuing any zpool command:

        # zpool import refuse to import without a valid mtab
        [ ! -f /proc/mounts ] && mount proc /proc
        [ ! -f /etc/mtab ] && cat /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab

That part originates from Sep 12, 2013 so I'm going to assume that this problem is fixed for Debian GNU/Linux.

Looking through the Ubuntu stable and snapshot tags, this is not fixed in Precise, Quantal, Raring and the Saucy tags. @dajhorn you might want to take a look at merging fixes from snapshot/debian/wheezy/0.6.3-0.9_g540ce4_wheezy

[dajhorn]

Other forms of this issue went wontfix after systemd integration, so I will similarly close this ticket as stale because it has the Ubuntu label.