You are not logged in.

#1 2016-07-17 16:35:43

LeftyAce
Member
Registered: 2012-08-18
Posts: 159

Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

Hi all,

This is the second time this has happened in the past few weeks. I run pacman -Syu, and it completes successfully as far as I can tell. But when I reboot, I am greeted with this error (I wrote it down by hand, and I've ommitted some of the hex strings):

Failed to execute /init (error -2
Kernel panic - noy syncing: No working init found. Try passing init= option to kernel. See linux ocumentation/init.txt for guidance.
CPU: 2 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 not tainted 4.6.4-1-ARCH #1
Hardware name: LENOVO 4286CTO/4286CTO, BIOS 8DET72WW (1.42) 02/18/2016
0000000000000086 00000000ae2dd09f
More hex strings

Call Trace:
[<HEX>] dump_stack+0x63/0x81
[<HEX>] panic+0xde/0x220
[<HEX>] kernel_init+0xeb/0x100
[<HEX>] ret_from_fork+0x22/0x40
[<HEX>] ? rest_init+0x90/0x90
Kernel Offset: disabled
---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: no working init found. Try passing init= option to kernel. See Linux Documentation/init.txt for guidance.

I've been able to recover by doing a full restore of the / partition from a backup, but that of course means I'm stuck and cannot run updates.

My configuration is this:

/boot on a USB key.
/ on half of an internal SSD (encrypted)
/home on a bcache volume with the other half of the SSD as the cache, and a 1TB HDD as the backing device. (also encrypted).

The first time it happened, I thought I had neglected to mount the /boot drive before running the upgrade. I just tried again, this time with /boot definitely mounted.

I used to run a setup like this with no problems. The main differences between then and now:
1) I'm running EFI instead of MBR+grub
2) I have udiskie installed to automount usb drives, and it has some problems if the drive it's trying to mount also appears in /etc/fstab (it'll mount some things but they won't be writeable). I mounted /boot manually, but perhaps there's still a conflict.
I uninstalled udiskie (pacman -Rsn) and rebooted, but the upgrade still failed. Maybe I needed to uninstall udisks2 as well?

Any ideas on what to do?

Thanks,

Lefty

Offline

#2 2016-07-18 12:38:44

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,866

Re: Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

What bootloader do you use and how is it configured ?

Was root sucessfully unlocked before you got that message ?


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

Offline

#3 2016-07-18 14:07:37

LeftyAce
Member
Registered: 2012-08-18
Posts: 159

Re: Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

Thanks for the reply, Lone Wolf.

I'm using systemd-boot with this file in /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf:

title   Arch Linux
linux   /vmlinuz-linux
initrd  /intel-ucode.img
initrd  /initramfs-linux.img
options cryptdevice=UUID=f4017da9-ba0b-4f2d-b7ff-3d65091b46fa:cryptroot cryptkey=UUID=050D-B8AC:vfat:/keyfile root=/dev/mapper/cryptroot quiet

I don't think root was unlocked, since the kernel panic message comes up so quickly. It's hard to tell though, because I have root set up with just a keyfile, so the unlocking happens automatically.

EDIT: could this be the problem? From the wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … t#Updating

"Unlike the previous separate gummiboot package, which updated automatically on a new package release with a post_install script, updates of new systemd-boot versions are now handled manually by the user."

Do I need to pay attention to when systemd-boot is updated and run that additional step manually? Could that cause this problem?

Last edited by LeftyAce (2016-07-18 14:09:49)

Offline

#4 2016-07-19 02:54:26

LeftyAce
Member
Registered: 2012-08-18
Posts: 159

Re: Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

Ok, some more updates. I tried the full update again, and this time I ran

 bootctl- update

. I get the same kernel panic when I reboot though. The panic message appears immediately after the BIOS splash screen, and the beginning of each line (which I think is a timestamp) says [0.604350], so it seems like it's crashing 0.6 seconds into the boot process?

Here's some more diagnostic information: I tried just restoring /boot from a backup, and the kernel panic is gone and I can boot. But I get warnings/errors about missing drivers, Xorg won't start, and the system is broken. I get weird permission denied errors as a regular user in my own home directory.

If I restore /boot and /usr from the backup, everything seems to work fine, although of course I've now partially (or mostly) undone the system update...

Offline

#5 2016-07-19 04:27:28

mich41
Member
Registered: 2012-06-22
Posts: 796

Re: Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

It looks like your bootloader isn't loading initrd for some reason.

Offline

#6 2016-08-12 13:58:55

schmodd
Member
Registered: 2015-02-12
Posts: 33

Re: Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

I expierenced the same problem today after I upgraded these 3 packages and rebooted after:
linux 4.7-1
linux-headers 4.7-1
nvidia 367.35-2

I am using uefi + systemd-boot.
/boot and / on a single ssd
/home on a sata drive

I did chroot into my system and did another system update and also reinstalled those 3 packages again.
It is all being generated without an error.

All pretty basic and prior to this error it all worked well.
Any ideas?

Last edited by schmodd (2016-08-12 14:09:53)

Offline

#7 2016-08-12 14:13:25

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,866

Re: Kernel panic after full system upgrade, /boot on external usb

schmodd, LeftyAce uses a very specific setup, with an encrypted / , /boot and a keyfile stored on an external usb,

Unless you have a similar setup, you probably have a different problem then LeftyAce and should start a new thread.


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB