Arch Linux

killnine

Member

Registered: 2011-12-14

Posts: 62

Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

1st boot post pacman -Syu. About 2 months since last update. x64 system. Dell xps 15z

Booting the kernel.
[ 0.732052] Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive
[ 0.974035] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS Unable to mount root fs on unkown-block(0,0)
[ 0.974092] Pid: 1, comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 3.2.6-2ARCH #1
[ 0.974141] Call Trace:
panic
mount_blcok_root
? name_to_dev_t
mount_root
prepare_namespace
?release_tgcred.isra
? start_kernel
? gs_change

killnine

Member

Registered: 2011-12-14

Posts: 62

Re: Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

I fixed this by booting live arch system from usb and performed the following steps:

mount /dev/sda5 /a
cd /mnt/a
mount -t proc proc proc/
mount -t sysfs sys sys/
mount -o bind /dev dev/
chroot . /bin/bash
mkinitcpio -p linux
reboot

Am very curious to learn about the compression problem. As neither the update log or mkinitcpio output warned of issues.

falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

What compression are you using? Likely you can work around this by disabling compression (set COMPRESSION=cat). I've seen this before when I've tried to stuff all of Python onto an initramfs, and it ended up about 20MiB in size (I needed gdb!).

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blog | ±github

killnine

Member

Registered: 2011-12-14

Posts: 62

Re: Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

What compression are you using? Likely you can work around this by disabling compression (set COMPRESSION=cat). I've seen this before when I've tried to stuff all of Python onto an initramfs, and it ended up about 20MiB in size (I needed gdb!).

// mkinitcpio.conf

...
# COMPRESSION
# Use this to compress the initramfs image. With kernels earlier than
# 2.6.30, only gzip is supported, which is also the default. Newer kernels
# support gzip, bzip2 and lzma. Kernels 2.6.38 and later support xz
# compression.
#COMPRESSION="gzip"
#COMPRESSION="bzip2"
#COMPRESSION="lzma"
#COMPRESSION="xz"
#COMPRESSION="lzop"

# COMPRESSION_OPTIONS
# Additional options for the compressor
#COMPRESSION_OPTIONS=""

falconindy

Developer

From: New York, USA

Registered: 2009-10-22

Posts: 4,111

Website

Re: Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

Which means you're using gzip, where I saw this problem. I should report this...

---

blog | ±github

sorh

Member

Registered: 2012-06-02

Posts: 4

Re: Initramfs unpacking failed: junk in compressed archive

Just today i updated my system and replaced udev. When rebooting kernel Id got similiar kernel panic and I tried what killnine had done, without any effect. I also tried disabling compression but it didint work too. (intel proc)