Ominous Orange Flash - LUKS initramfs breakage

1

Hi,

This is goIng to have to be terse as I have to write this on my phone.

Twice now I have booted up my laptop running Ubuntu 24.04 and inserted my onlykey to input the LUKS password to decrypt the filesystem and boot the machine. Twice my onlykey has begun flashing orange which is odd enough, but then this seems to break the initramfs boot process permanently.

I have previously used a live usb to rebuild and hence fix the initramfs. At that point my onlykey refused to act as a keyboard input and I had to type the password manually. At least the machine would boot though. Somehow after a kernel update, the machine accepted the onlykey inputting the LUKS password, but now it is broken again after the orange light of doom.

Does anyone understand what could possibly be going wrong? I am perplexed.

The onlykey continues to work fine and only yesterday I updated it to the latest firmware.

2

So we don’t use orange for any of the OnlyKey functions here are the LED definitions OnlyKey Features | Docs

The LED on OnlyKey is actually a Red/Green/Blue combined LED so colors are made by mixing those colors. Its possible to get an orange light if OnlyKey hardware failure occurs. Its possible the LED is actually yellow, which may appear orangeish. If you have another OnlyKey to try that would rule out hardware failure.

3

Thanks for linking to the relevant section of the docs. I had struggled to find that information on the meaning of the LED colours.

It’s possible it’s yellow. I wonder whether cryptsetup sees the onlykey and attempts to set it into HMAC mode to decrypt the LUKS partition. It seems like such a thing is possible.

Unfortunately I don’t have a second onlykey I can test with.