I'm having a tough time getting LUKS encryption to work on Ubuntu 22.04 for an ARM-based system. I've successfully set up LUKS many times on RHEL, but this is my first attempt on Ubuntu, and I'm less familiar with it compared to Fedora. We installed Ubuntu without LUKS and that went fine, but when we try reinstalling with LUKS, the installer hangs after I hit 'Reboot' at the end. It shows a flashing cursor for about an hour before eventually rebooting to the GRUB menu, where it fails to go any further. We also attempted to install Ubuntu 24.04 with a GUI and LUKS, but it ended with a black screen after the GRUB menu.
I've been using the default auto-setup LUKS options in the installer, without any custom partitions. The install logs don't seem to show any obvious errors, but they are quite long and hard to read since I'm doing this over a KVM setup.
A few things to note:
- No Internet access on the devices, so I can't get any updates or additional packages.
- We're relying on passphrase-based unlocking since there's no TPM.
- UEFI is enabled but I haven't changed any settings.
- I've tried three different ISOs on two different USB drives, and they all yield the same outcome.
- The BIOS is fully updated and the board is relatively new.
- I've accessed the GRUB CLI and seen mentions of needing cryptomount config, but I'm unsure of the correct partition layout or if that's even the issue.
I suspect that some necessary packages might be missing, or that the GRUB config isn't set up correctly for encrypted boots. I'm also considering trying the HWE kernel or the Pro version of Ubuntu, though that part is still up in the air. Documentation on Ubuntu with LUKS for ARM is sparse, so I'm hoping someone here can share their experiences or insights!
1 Answer
Have you thought about regenerating the initramfs after a failed boot? You would need to boot into a rescue environment and chroot into your encrypted LUKS system to do that. I've had luck fixing LUKS issues this way in the past!
I haven’t done that yet, but I did try to live boot with my Ubuntu 24.04 ISO to access my files. I struggled to find the correct device in the GUI since there were multiple drives listed with LVM. I could unlock the LUKS-encrypted volume, but I think I was looking at the wrong partition. The KVM setup complicates things further. I guess I’ll have to give it another go after doing some more reading on it!