chameleon

I don’t have Obsidian around, but this has been happening elsewhere lately too, almost certainly because of this underlying Electron issue: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/43819

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do about it. Electron decided to depend on functionality not yet in a released version, and that very interesting choice flows down to everything that updates their Electron on the regular.

Sorry, I’ve had a (self-imposed) busy week, but I have to admit, that also has me rather stumped. As far as I can tell, your second entry should work. If the device is visible in /dev/mapper under a name, it should be able to mount under that name.

The only thing I can think of is that some important module like the ext4 module might be missing somehow? You can get pretty confusing errors when that happens. Dracut is supposed to parse /etc/fstab for everything needed to boot, and maybe that’s not recognizing your root for some reason. dmesg might have some useful info at the end after you try to mount it. If that’s what’s happening, you could try to add add_drivers+=" ext4 " in your dracut.conf and regenerate it (the spaces are important!). But if that’s not it, then I’m probably out of ideas now.

I think you should check your root= line and add a rd.luks.uuid= to make it open it. Dracut will by default open the root FS as /dev/mapper/luks-abcdef... based on the LUKS container UUID. You can get that with cryptsetup luksUUID. /dev/mapper/root is just never going to show up unless you’ve assigned a custom name to that with the barely documented rd.luks.name, and I don’t see that in your setup. The cryptroot and cryptdm parameters aren’t used by Dracut either.

With all of that missing it’s just gonna wait for that /dev/mapper/root to magically show up out of nowhere, without ever trying to open it.

A correct cmdline will probably look something along the lines of root=/dev/mapper/luks-<uuid> modules=sd-mod,usb-storage,ext4 rootfstype=ext4 rootflags=rw,relatime rd.luks.uuid=<uuid> and once opening with passphrase works, you can start to mess with rd.luks.key=/awesome.key (and readd quiet when done debugging, if you want it that way).

ldconfig errors and the missing modules should be fine. musl’s ldconfig is just a bit different but also isn’t required in quite the same way. I don’t think you should need to mess with modules manually. I don’t think you’re using LVM’s userland for your setup, just all the device-mapper kernel modules. Dracut will pull all the necessary bits in for you if you’re setting it up for LUKS.

Dracut may have this functionality already built in via rd.luks.key, so a custom module would really only make sense if you’re trying to do more than that. You can probably get away with just using that if you just want it to work, but if you want to customize stuff:

I suspect your module is running well after the device is already supposed to be cryptsetup opened. The way the default crypt module handles it is by setting up udev configuration in a very early phase, and then having udev request the password a little bit later when it finds the device it’s trying to open, until all devices are ready. It’s a complex mechanism compared to Alpine’s straightforward script, but it’s much more flexible when it comes to ordering of things like RAID/network devices/LUKS/etc.

The result of that is that your code would have to run much earlier. There’s some documentation on how hooks work, and the builtin rd.luks.key / keydev handler runs at cmdline 10. That’s well before your pre-mount, and probably where you’d want to run your code. Based on a cursory inspection of the other code, you could either cryptsetup open it yourself if you use the name it expects (rd.luks.name= cmdline parameter or luks-$luks_container_uuid), or you could use that /tmp/luks.keys mechanism (it’s a dracut-internal thing so you won’t find much documentation, but it lives in crypt-lib.sh, cryptroot-ask.sh and probe-keydev.sh).

As for debugging, the cmdline manpage has a few decent enough options. rd.break=cmdline or similar can force a shell before Dracut goes through a specific phase of hooks. You should be able to manually test doing things similar to your script at that point.

You’d be looking for /usr/share/mkinitfs/initramfs-init . I’ve never customized that myself, but it looks like there’s already some support for a keyfile if you look for KOPT_cryptroot and check that block of code. That looks like it’s mostly set up for a keyfile embedded into the initramfs, but I guess it should be possible to replace that code with something that grabs the keyfile off an USB drive.

I suppose you’d make a copy of it, put it somewhere in /etc or whatever and change the mkinitfs.conf to point to it. init="/etc/whatever/myinitramfs-init" should do the trick since the config file just gets sourced in. That said you’re definitively heading into unknown territory here. It might be easier to just use Dracut or the like instead.

mkinitfs doesn’t support running custom shell hooks. mkinitfs is very, very, very bare-bones custom code and the whole features concept exists only to pull extra files and kernel modules into the initramfs, not for extra logic.

You’d either have to customize the init script itself (not impossible, it’s 1000 lines) and pass -i/set init= in the .conf, or install Dracut/Booster instead (which should “just work” if you apk add them, but I’ve had no need to do so).