Tracked this down a bit more. There is some race condition with lv_activate. If I load up with IO, I can win the race. (I assume I'm either slowing down the vgck from udev, or slowing down the lvcreate itself...)
Here's a failure: # lvcreate -s -L1G -n test1 /dev/systemvg/edgy_chroot-i386 LV systemvg/test1 in use: not deactivating Couldn't deactivate new snapshot. And if I nudge the disks, I can get a success: # (ls -lR /var >/dev/null) & # lvcreate -s -L1G -n test1 /dev/systemvg/edgy_chroot-i386 Logical volume "test1" created Putting a "sleep(2)" at the start of lv_activate also "solved" it, but doing retries within lv_activate just ends up hanging the command. :( -- [feisty] failures when opening snapshots https://launchpad.net/bugs/84672 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs