Arch Linux

rtorrero

Member

Registered: 2015-10-22

Posts: 12

[SOLVED] Systemd imploded after freeze during pacman -Syu

Hi!

Yesterday, while performing some GPU intensive computation, I thought it would be a good moment for a system upgrade. Bad idea as my system froze probably due to the buggy ROCm support my GPU has, and my system was left in a very messy state (see attached picture, very sorry for using a picture instead of a text paste but I can't output this anywhere):

Failed boot

It looks like something broke dbus or systemd as all units fail to load. Things I've tried:
- Booting from a USB and using arch-chroot to look at `journalctl`. No luck, seems that even the journal daemon fails to start
- Reinstalling all packages (2600+ packages, they get reinstalled but it didn't fix the issue)
- Forced fsck. Fixed a few errors, but the issue is still there
- Removed grub for refind
- Recreated the whole EFI partition
- Checked all UUIDs in fstab -> all correct. Also tried reducing to a minimal the drives I mount
- Replaced dbus-broker-units with dbus-daemon-units.
- I can use init=/bin/bash on GRUBs CMDLINE and then I can get to a shell. But there, any attempt to start systemd leads to the same issue. It doesn't give any valuable information no matter what, even when I force it to log to the terminal
- use pacstrap to recreate the base system

I'm trying many things because I'm unable to really see any meaningful error. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

Last edited by rtorrero (2025-02-21 09:05:17)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,723

Re: [SOLVED] Systemd imploded after freeze during pacman -Syu

What does `pacman -Q glibc` show while chrooted into the system?

rtorrero

Member

Registered: 2015-10-22

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Systemd imploded after freeze during pacman -Syu

What does `pacman -Q glibc` show while chrooted into the system?

glibc-eac-bin 2.40-1

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 12,723

Re: [SOLVED] Systemd imploded after freeze during pacman -Syu

Arch is on 2.41. By replacing the Arch version with a 3rd party one, you're out of sync with Arch and it resulted in a partial update. If you replace low level libs, you have to know what you're doing.

rtorrero

Member

Registered: 2015-10-22

Posts: 12

Re: [SOLVED] Systemd imploded after freeze during pacman -Syu

Arch is on 2.41. By replacing the Arch version with a 3rd party one, you're out of sync with Arch and it resulted in a partial update. If you replace low level libs, you have to know what you're doing.

Damn, I was convinced that my issue was some file corruption due to the crash during the update, I completely missed the glibc version mismatch. I should look at version changes in updates more often

Thanks, fixed now :-)