HAL + LUKS

[Danny Kukawka]

On Samstag, 13. Oktober 2007, Jakub Schmidtke wrote:
> Another problem I had is with some of USB devices. Some of them, when I
> use 'Safely remove' action of KDE's mediamanager, are umounted and powered
> off. And their icons disappears from KDE's list of drives. If they are
> encrypted, they are also unmapped (cryptsetup luksClose). But some of mine
> USB drives are not powered down. I only get KDE's error, something
> like: "Media was umounted but could not be removed.". I am able to mount
> them again. But the problem is, that they don't get unmapped by cryptsetup,
> so they are still present as /dev/mapper/luks_crypto_*. I use another
> application, that calls 'teardown' method on such devices. It unmaps the
> volume properly, but the drive is still visible in KDE's media list (but it
> is not accessible, attempt to mount it raises an error, that the device
> path - /dev/mapper/luks_* - does not exist). I have no idea why that
> happens (especially when it happens only for some of my USB flash drives
> while others work fine. I also have one external USB HDD case, which works
> fine, and external USB harddrive - Seagate Freeagent - that doesn't, and
> can't be powered down using 'safely remove') and what might be a problem,
> but for some reason HAL still thinks that device is still there - and lshal
> confirms that.

This is a bug in HAL (which add a Eject() to the related dm-device, while 
eject is a ioctl which is not allowed on dm, see my patch on the list) and 
KDE (Which should call org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Crypto::Teadown() 
instead of Eject(). This is IIRC already fixed in the SUSE KDE packages, not 
sure if it's already upstream in the KDE SVN.)

Danny