I am installing Gentoo Linux on my machine and I'm running into LVM problems. The installer CD is 2.6 kernel based, but I am installing a 2.4 kernel based system. Gentoo has an install profile for this to prevent programs and libraries that have a dependency on 2.6 kernel headers from being installed when a 2.4 profile is being used. As part of the install process, I created an LVM2 volume group containing LVs for /, /usr, /var, /opt, and /home. I created filesystems on these LVs and performed the installation no problem. I also configured and compiled the kernel, which is a 2.4.32 based kernel with LVM2 backported into it by the Gentoo developer team. I created the initrd which is based on an initrd I created myself and have been using successfully on 2.4 and 2.6 based kernels. It contains the LVM tools and libraries, along with disk drivers and the device-mapper driver. When I run vgscan, it finds the volume group no problem. However, when I run 'vgchange -ay <vgname>', I see three problems. 1. There are entries in /dev/mapper/<vgname>-<lvname>, but no symlinks in the form /dev/<vgname>/<lvname> --> /dev/mapper/<vgname>/<lvname>. I run 'lvm vgmknodes' and it remedies this. 2. I see five complaints from 'vgchange -ay <vgname>' (one for each LV) as follows: on stderr: device-mapper: table ioctl failed: Invalid argument on console (from dm-mod driver): device-mapper: one of name or uuid must be supplied, cmd (12) I ran vgchange under strace and here is the following snippet: open("/dev/mapper/control", O_RDWR|O_LARGEFILE) = 9 ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) mlockall(MCL_CURRENT|MCL_FUTURE) = 0 brk(0x8936000) = 0x8936000 brk(0x8b1e000) = 0x8b1e000 getpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, 0) = 20 setpriority(PRIO_PROCESS, 0, -18) = 0 ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) ioctl(9, DM_DEV_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 ENXIO (No such device or address) stat64("/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part10", {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0600, st_rdev=makedev(3, 10), ...}) = 0 stat64("/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part11", {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0600, st_rdev=makedev(3, 11), ...}) = 0 stat64("/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part12", {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0600, st_rdev=makedev(3, 12), ...}) = 0 ioctl(9, DM_DEV_CREATE, 0x8109958) = 0 ioctl(9, DM_TABLE_STATUS, 0x8109958) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument) write(2, " ", 2) = 2 write(2, "device-mapper: table ioctl faile"..., 51) = 51 write(2, "\n", 1) = 1 3. When I try to mount the filesystem in that LV, it fails. I tried with different filesystem types and it's the same result. From within the 2.4 kernel based initrd, it fails. If I reboot into the 2.6 kernel based installer environment, no problem. This looks like an incompatibility between the lvm2 and/or device-mapper library code and the kernel device-mapper code. Here are the versions installed in the install environment (the one that works): lvm> version LVM version: 2.02.05 (2006-04-21) Library version: 1.02.03 (2006-02-08) Driver version: 4.4.0 In the initrd, the only thing different would be the driver version. Later today I will have access to the machine again and I can run the lvm version command there to see what the driver version is. In the meantime, I am looking at the kernel sources and I don't see anything obvious in the driver/md directory. -- dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel