[dm-devel] Chicken and egg problem with multipath-tools

[Andrei B.]

--- On Mon, 3/4/13, Hannes Reinecke <hare at suse.de> wrote:

> From: Hannes Reinecke <hare at suse.de>

> > The problem is that multipathd wants to create a PID
> file under /var (which is at this time readonly).
> > This fails and multipathd fails to start.
> > It took me a lot of testing and reboots until I managed
> to determine this is the actual problem.
> > 

> Hmm. Why? multipathd can happily live without a PID file;
> SUSE has been doing this for years (for precisely the same
> reason).
> Check the SUSE init scripts.

Official (from author's website) multipath-tools contain a multipathd that has hardcoded PIDFILE location and there is no runtime option to change its location or disable it. Both manpage and source show this. 
Maybe SUSE has a modified multipathd with added option to control PIDFILE creation.