Hi. Just a quick report to say that I have successfully used the Gervai RAID and LVM hook[1] to FAI install a bunch of new hosts with root on LVM, using FAI as shipped with Debian Etch.
Note: I have no need for RAID but it should be easy to generalise the following steps to work with the Root on LVM on RAID approach. Besides installing the SW_RAID script as described by its documentation, it was also necessary to: * Append dm_mod to the kernelmodules in class/20-hwdetect.source, so that the booted install system becomes LVM capable. * Create a configuration script (included below) that that adds the device mapper modules to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and rebuilds the initramfs at the end of installation. (The presence of these modules causes update-initramfs to include the relevant libraries and binaries for the initrd to support LVM.) Irrespective of whether or not LVM/RAID support will be included within vanilla FAI anytime soon, it could be immediately useful to amend the default FAI tasklist somehow so that at a stage after installing the packages it will check the contents of a variable, say INITRD_MODULES, which unless empty it appends to $target/etc/initramfs-tools/modules and invokes $ROOTCMD update-initramfs -u. This would give you some simple control of what lands in your initrd, avoiding the need for my fixup script. However, I think that is would be very valuable to support Root on LVM (on RAID) since this is a supported option by the "new" Debian Installer and nowadays the BusyBox-based initramfs makes debugging of boot problems much easier that with the previous system. Hope this helps, Tez [1] http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/User:Gervai/Raid_and_LVM_hook ---- Contents of scripts/SW_RAID/10-misc: #! /bin/bash error=0 ; trap "error=$((error|1))" ERR cat <<EOF >> $target/etc/initramfs-tools/modules dm_mod dm_mirror dm_snapshot EOF $ROOTCMD update-initramfs -u # Fix the incorrect /dev/ entry that the SW_RAID helper makes in fstab with root on LVM # - Obviously it would be better to fix the Gervai RAID and LVM hook in the first place sed -ie '/^\/dev\/ /d' /tmp/target/etc/fstab