Arch Linux

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Boot freeze

I installed arch on my computer and everything was going great but suddenly it won't boot anymore...
I have a dual boot Arch / Windows 10 with grub as a boot loader.
I can successfully access grub and windows but not arch.
It echos 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' and then does nothing.
I assume it can't load the image of the kernel since the next line in grub is 'initrd /initramfs-linux.img'.
I still have access to everything in it by chroot-ing from an arch image I burned on a USB key.

Tried:

• rebuilding the image with pacman && grub-mkconfig && mkinitcpio

• installing another kernel (linux-lts)

• removing 'quiet' and/or adding 'splash' to the kernel argument to get some error messages

But still nothing...

I don't know if I should post here or in Kernel & Hardware since I'm a newbie, sorry.
I'm not sure what's happening, please help me understand what I did wrong

Last edited by VokunGahrotLaas (2020-09-24 18:46:11)

GaKu999

Member

From: US/Eastern

Registered: 2020-06-21

Posts: 696

Re: Boot freeze

Welcome to the boards.

And post the actual commands with outputs between code tags.

Have you rebuilded the initramfs?
From archiso, do after arch-chroot:

# pacman -Syu linux; grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Are you using mkinitcpio or dracut?
For mkinitcpio or dracut + dracut-hook installing the kernel makes the initramfs get rebuilt.

Or you can rebuild the initramfs manually.

And change the path of grub.cfg if you have it somewhere else.

Since you have WIN, have you disabled fast boot and hibernation? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Du … ibernation

Have you tried a cold boot? Sometimes UEFI gets derped and starts behaving all wrong until you shutdown, wait, and cold boot.

---

My repos • Some snippets

Heisenberg might have been here.

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

First i tried rebuilding the initramfs with:

# pacman -Syu linux
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/brug.cfg
# mkinitcpio -p linux

But that did not work so I tried using linux-lts instead:

# pacman -Syu linux-lts
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/brug.cfg
# mkinitcpio -p linux-lts

But neither of these two worked.

Windows fast boot was on so I disabled it.
I already disabled hibernation mode beforehand.

And I cold boot each time I try to boot into arch.

PS: I don't know if I was clear enough on the fact that windows still boots normally from grub, it's just arch that freezes on boot.

Mblack

Member

Registered: 2020-08-18

Posts: 1

Re: Boot freeze

Do you have "splash" kernel argument? I've been having an issue where that causes the boot to hang.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,043

Re: Boot freeze

What caused the issue to occur?  Package update?  Configuration change?

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

Do you have "splash" kernel argument? I've been having an issue where that causes the boot to hang.

Yup, tried that one, still nothing...

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

What caused the issue to occur?  Package update?  Configuration change?

The thing is I do not remember doing any important modifications before the problem.
The last thing I did was installing&making cling from AUR with yay...

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,043

Re: Boot freeze

If you press the power button after the screen goes blank does the system shutdown?  Indicating the issue with the display.
What is the version of the linux / linux-lts with the issue and the version on live media without the issue?

Last edited by loqs (2020-09-24 18:31:45)

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

If you press the power button after the screen goes blank does the system shutdown?  Indicating the issue with the display.
What is the version of the linux / linux-lts with the issue and the version on live media without the issue?

I have to hold press of the button for it to shutdown.
For the versions, pacman tell me:

linux 5.8.10.arch1-1
linux-lts 5.4.66-1

As for the archiso it's:

archlinux-2020.08.01-x86_64

euromatlox

Member

Registered: 2017-02-10

Posts: 153

Re: Boot freeze

If not secret, some information about system could be useful. Computer brand & model, cpu brand & model, for instance. One idea is to edit grub configuration to temporarily disable those microcode updates for cpu, see if it then boots. In that case you should probably use (for a while) an older version of microcode, and prevent pacman updating microcode automatically.

Last edited by euromatlox (2020-09-24 19:13:11)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,043

Re: Boot freeze

archlinux-2020.08.01-x86_64 uses 5.7.11.  If you downgrade the kernel to a 5.7.X release if you have one in your cache,  if not the oldest release you do have in the cache.
This may break out of tree modules but that can be fixed after the boot progresses beyond loading the kernel.

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

If not secret, some information about system could be useful. Computer brand & model, cpu brand & model, for instance. One idea is to edit grub configuration to temporarily disable those microcode updates for cpu, see if it then boots. In that case you should probably use (for a while) an older version of microcode, and prevent pacman updating microcode automatically.

Computer: Thinkpad E14 gen2
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 4500U

euromatlox

Member

Registered: 2017-02-10

Posts: 153

Re: Boot freeze

Earlier case with random freeze (including solution) on Ryzen cpu here.

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

archlinux-2020.08.01-x86_64 uses 5.7.11.  If you downgrade the kernel to a 5.7.X release if you have one in your cache,  if not the oldest release you do have in the cache.
This may break out of tree modules but that can be fixed after the boot progresses beyond loading the kernel.

Downgraded to 5.8.3 which is the oldest that I have in cache but still nothing.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,043

Re: Boot freeze

In grub edit the boot options remove both initrds the microcode one and the actual initrd.  The kernel should then fail with a panic but should confirm the booted kernel is 5.8.3.

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

Earlier case with random freeze (including solution) on Ryzen cpu here.

I do not have random freezes but systematic ones.
processor.max_cstate=1 does not change a thing on my side.
In addition:

journalctl | grep -i "hardware err"

does not give out anything.

euromatlox

Member

Registered: 2017-02-10

Posts: 153

Re: Boot freeze

If booting directly into graphical target, it would be better (at least temporarily) switch into multi-user.target, which boots into command line. For graphical mode, just type startx and press enter. I have this multi-user setup all the time.

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

In grub edit the boot options remove both initrds the microcode one and the actual initrd.  The kernel should then fail with a panic but should confirm the booted kernel is 5.8.3.

Removing the initrd line from grub doesn't do anything, it just freezes like usual after Loading initial ramdisk... ?!

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,043

Re: Boot freeze

Did you remove one or two initrd entries?  If it was just one the microcode initrd would still be loaded.  Try passing the boot option dis_ucode_ldr to disable microcode updates.

euromatlox

Member

Registered: 2017-02-10

Posts: 153

Re: Boot freeze

If you have earlier kernels (which worked without problems) try downgrading. Check the package cache for packages.

~]$ ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux*
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-5.8.10.arch1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-5.8.9.arch2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-api-headers-5.8-1-any.pkg.tar.zst
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-firmware-20200817.7a30af1-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

If earlier kernel works, remember to prevent pacman updates (look for IgnorePkg in the config file) of that package for a while (till it probably gets fixed soon).

In case of kernel, inside pacman.conf should be line:

IgnorePkg = linux nvidia

and possibly also some other kernel dependent packages (nvidia included there as an example, I have noticed that it's released often when kernel is updated, I'm not sure how dependent it is.)

Last edited by euromatlox (2020-09-24 20:16:18)

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

If you have earlier kernels (which worked without problems) try downgrading. Check the package cache for packages.

~]$ ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux*
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-5.8.10.arch1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-5.8.9.arch2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-api-headers-5.8-1-any.pkg.tar.zst
/var/cache/pacman/pkg/linux-firmware-20200817.7a30af1-1-any.pkg.tar.zst

If earlier kernel works, remember to prevent pacman updates (look for IgnorePkg in the config file) of that package for a while (till it probably gets fixed soon).

In case of kernel, inside pacman.conf should be line:

IgnorePkg = linux nvidia

and possibly also some other kernel dependent packages (nvidia included there as an example, I have noticed that it's released often when kernel is updated, I'm not sure how dependent it is.)

Already downgraded to 5.8.3 but still not booting...

euromatlox

Member

Registered: 2017-02-10

Posts: 153

Re: Boot freeze

Might not be kernel related, but perhaps a late 5.7 kernel could be tried to be more sure. Lots of Intel/AMD changes (new cpus)  on Linux 5.8 kernel

As said under this post (next post by logs), journalctl can be handy. Just tried it myself.

 ls /var/log/journal/

journalctl --directory=/var/log/journal/<machine-id>

Last edited by euromatlox (2020-09-24 20:54:43)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,043

Re: Boot freeze

After chrooting in the journal for the last boot would show the last kernel that did work.
If microcode was still being loaded is unanswered from post #19.

VokunGahrotLaas

Member

Registered: 2020-09-24

Posts: 12

Re: Boot freeze

After chrooting in the journal for the last boot would show the last kernel that did work.
If microcode was still being loaded is unanswered from post #19.

Did not have any microcode initrd.
The last kernel that did work was linux 5.8.10-arch1-1 two days ago (according to journalctl).
But that's the latest kernel, I don't think that's where the problem comes from...

I remember having a bios update not so long ago, that might be the cause ?
(Thinkpad bios updated from Lenovo Vantage app on Windows)
But the thing is it got installed on the 21 and last successful arch boot was on the 23...

Tried to boot with linux 5.7.11-arch1-1 and it's modules but that did not work either...

euromatlox

Member

Registered: 2017-02-10

Posts: 153

Re: Boot freeze

I think microcode might be needed, since it fixes things with cpus. So it's probably better put it back.

For AMD processors, install the amd-ucode package.

For Intel processors, install the intel-ucode package.

After that, of course bootloader should be refreshed, if install does not do it. Then reboot. Look ArchWiki microcode page for details.

Package linux-firmware is also important, but I guess it does install automatically with core components. Easy to check anyway.

Last edited by euromatlox (2020-09-25 16:46:08)