Arch Linux

wuxb

Member

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 29

Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

My system boots fine but I happened to find a strange message in system journal:

Aug 04 11:34:47 server kernel: Unpacking initramfs...
Aug 04 11:34:47 server kernel: Initramfs unpacking failed: data corrupted
Aug 04 11:34:47 server kernel: Freeing initrd memory: 4176K (ffff8800377c8000 - ffff880037bdc000)

I use COMPRESSION="lz4" in mkinitcpio and my system configuration is like this:
* linux-3.15.8 x86_64
* grub 2
* xfs as both root/boot partition

Everything went well but this messages appear everytime reboot.
It seems the initrd is never used?
Does that mean someday system will not be able to boot after some hardware change?

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

you shouldn't be able to boot in default arch kernel if your initramfs doesn't work. at least modules for your rootfs and block device needs to be loaded from initramfs.
lz4 initramfs compression should work out of the box (well, you need to 'pacman -S lz4' to compress the image but decompression should work).

I have no idea why you get that error though, and it's quite odd since you can still boot your system.
have you tried simply rebuilding your initramfs image?

off-topic, but thought I'd mention still:
If you compress your initramfs with lz4, you might also want to add this in your mkinitcpio.conf to compress with lz4hc:

COMPRESSION_OPTIONS="-9"

it has better compress ratio and faster decompression speed compared to lz4 in expense of slower compression.

wuxb

Member

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 29

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

I had lz4 installed so I passed "mkinitcpio -p linux"
The initrd file was updated then...
So strange..

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

do you get the same error with the rebuilt initramfs?

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

Post your mkinitcpio.conf.
Have you tried adding 'lz4 lz4_compress' to your MODULES?

wuxb

Member

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 29

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

do you get the same error with the rebuilt initramfs?

Everytime. Actually this message flashes on screen for less than 1 second and then comes the gdm login GUI prompt.

wuxb

Member

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 29

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

Post your mkinitcpio.conf.
Have you tried adding 'lz4 lz4_compress' to your MODULES?

.conf:

MODULES=""
BINARIES=""
FILES=""
HOOKS="base udev autodetect block filesystems"
COMPRESSION="lz4"

linux.preset:

ALL_config="/etc/mkinitcpio.conf"
ALL_kver="/boot/vmlinuz-linux"
PRESETS=('default')
default_image="/boot/initramfs-linux.img"

wuxb

Member

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 29

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

Post your mkinitcpio.conf.
Have you tried adding 'lz4 lz4_compress' to your MODULES?

It does not help. I just switched back to gzip. The annoying messages disappeared.

It seems that the broken lz4 decompression reported in 3.13 kernel is still not fixed. What ever.

Thanks guys

Last edited by wuxb (2014-08-05 00:37:50)

Beauvoir

Member

Registered: 2014-08-05

Posts: 7

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

Hello

I searched in the mkinitcpio wiki page (I looked all languages) and some pages say to add COMPRESSION="lz4c". After rebuilt initramfs, it will throw a error with the command "lsinitcpio -a" because lz4c is deprecated, but if you add COMPRESSION_OPTIONS="-l" ("-l9" for best compression), will fix the messages during boot.

wuxb

Member

Registered: 2012-09-13

Posts: 29

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

Hello

I searched in the mkinitcpio wiki page (I looked all languages) and some pages say to add COMPRESSION="lz4c". After rebuilt initramfs, it will throw a error with the command "lsinitcpio -a" because lz4c is deprecated, but if you add COMPRESSION_OPTIONS="-l" ("-l9" for best compression), will fix the messages during boot.

Thanks It seems the upstream didn't fix this... It has been be like this for a long time...

Last edited by wuxb (2014-08-05 04:05:52)

Beauvoir

Member

Registered: 2014-08-05

Posts: 7

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

Thanks It seems the upstream didn't fix this... It has been be like this for a long time...

You are right If I reboot several times, the messages back. It's totally random, but I changed the compression for lz4 again and the messages disappeared. Probably will go back in a future boot

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Strange message in boot journal regarding lz4-compressed initrd

for the record, I've used lz4 to compress my initramfs image for quite some time, and I've never seen that error. Just checked journalctl and didn't see it there either.
I'm using custom kernel though..

Last edited by ooo (2014-08-05 06:59:05)