Arch Linux

sonnyka

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 21

After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

I did an upgrade of the linux-firmware package(s) according to the official commands

# pacman -Rdd linux-firmware
# pacman -Syu linux-firmware

After that the system does not reboot any longer:

• Boot kernel select show up

• Some 5 message show up

• Screen wents dark, no more output, SSD seems not to be accessed (physical HDD light stays dark)

I fired up an emergency system, mounted Arch + boot partition, chrooted and checked with

journalctl -b

• No boot entry has been generated, latest accessible boot entry is before the upgrade.

• Filesystem looks ok, data as expected is there

• Boot entries also look valid - and seem to work as dual-boot windows on same bootloader works well

• Re-created images with mkinitcpio -P - no change, boot still dead

SSD is a M2 Samsung Pro 990 2TB.

Dual-boot windows (on second SSD) fires up without problems.

Happy for any help!

Last edited by sonnyka (2025-06-22 15:16:19)

mackin_cheese

Member

Registered: 2025-01-07

Posts: 475

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Some 5 message show up

and what are those 5 messages?  also are you able to change to another TTY? perhaps it's just the graphical session not working properly

sonnyka

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 21

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

I solved the issue by downgrading to the old linux-firmware package:

Problem seems to be that the new linux-firmware packages do not contain the firmware for my motherboard (ASRock AMD B650E PG Riptide WiFi) to be able to access my SSD. Subsequently, the boot process stops after SSD access is tried (consequently, no journalctl entries can be created, as the SSD never could be accessed).

I tried to install all available optional new linux-firmware packages - with the same bad result.
It seems the current linux-firmware package is not ready - at least for my system.

Here are my rescues steps, in case it might help someone:

• Fired up rescue system, mounted root partition and boot partition, arch-chrooted to it.

• Forced uninstall of *all* new linux-firmware-* packages by pacman -Rdd <list-all-linux-firmware-*-packages-here>

• Downloaded manually the old package content from https://archive.archlinux.org/packages/ … kg.tar.zst with wget

• Forced a manual install of the old package with pacman -U ./linux-firmware-20250508.788aadc8-2-any.pkg.tar.zst

• Re-created boot images with mkinitcpio -P

• Rebooted - everything is fine again

sonnyka

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 21

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Update 2:
Seems it might not be related to the SSD / motherboard driver, but the AMD graphics card firmware for RX9000
(see https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … issues/17)

caitisgreat

Member

Registered: 2025-06-22

Posts: 1

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

I solved the issue by downgrading to the old linux-firmware package:

Problem seems to be that the new linux-firmware packages do not contain the firmware for my motherboard (ASRock AMD B650E PG Riptide WiFi) to be able to access my SSD. Subsequently, the boot process stops after SSD access is tried (consequently, no journalctl entries can be created, as the SSD never could be accessed).

I tried to install all available optional new linux-firmware packages - with the same bad result.
It seems the current linux-firmware package is not ready - at least for my system.

Here are my rescues steps, in case it might help someone: ...
Rebooted - everything is fine again

Hi, I registered just to say thanks for calling out the rescue steps. I had the exact same problem as you and I've never had to downgraded a package until today.

I'm running an AMD RX 9070 on an ASRock B650 Lightning / Ryzen 5 7600X

EDIT: one thing I forgot to add was I used the cached version of `linux-firmware` rather than wget to retrieve the package `/var/cache/pacman/pkg/`

Last edited by caitisgreat (2025-06-22 16:53:57)

sonnyka

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-11-16

Posts: 21

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Thank you for your feedback, glad my research did help someone!

blissing

Member

Registered: 2025-06-22

Posts: 1

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Thanks for sharing, was really weird as I tried to rollback to a snapshot with btrfs/snapper and the issue still persisted but downgrading solved the issue.

ShiroDN

Member

Registered: 2025-06-22

Posts: 1

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Yeah, same problem here with RX 9070XT.

ethylene

Member

Registered: 2025-06-22

Posts: 1

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

I ended up registering to thank you for your share. I had the same issue right now with an RX 9070 XT.

Last edited by ethylene (2025-06-22 19:05:05)

m1k.cloud

Member

Registered: 2024-09-16

Posts: 3

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

me too, just reverted to an older btrfs snapshot

cooldudedavo

Member

Registered: 2025-06-24

Posts: 1

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Another 9070xt user here, thanks for taking the time to write up those steps

roosta

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2015-08-20

Posts: 1

Website

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

Chiming in to say I was able to boot successfully with the latest firmware

linux-firmware 20250613.12fe085f-9

. Thanks everyone for resolution steps while waiting for upstream.

Xenolance

Member

Registered: 2025-06-26

Posts: 2

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

I also had this issue, I downgraded and it worked, there was a new firmware released, 20250613.12fe085f-9, and after upgrading it worked, until I restarted again, then it gave me the black screen again. I was able to get to tty and did

inxi -G

to see no GPU driver was installed, tried to remove linux-firmware and the linux-firmware-amdgpu, but the system said they didn't exist, so did a

-S linux-firmware

but noticed it didn't include -amdgpu, so did

-S linux-firmware linux-firmware-amdgpu

, restarted and all was fine again.

Anyone have any idea why the packages were just removed and why I keep having to install 20250613.12fe085f-9 to get it to work? I've been afraid to restart again as the first night it was a real chore to get back up and running. I read the news but there wasn't anything about this specific issue.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,111

Re: After linux-firmware upgrade: boot fails (SOLVED, downgraded)

What does "you have to keep doing that" mean exactly? You'd only need to do that once. Did you enable testing repos in an attempt to fix the original issue? You should probably opt out of that: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Offici … positories

If this doesn't help open a new thread and post the exact output you receive on update and potentially your /var/log/pacman.log