You are not logged in.
Dear Arch Forums,
I have encountered a problem while trying to install Arch Linux on a laptop for use as a desktop operating system. Upon installing a very minimal system according to the Installation Guide on the Arch Wiki, I rebooted the computer and selected an option on the GRUB menu which appeared as expected. Upon selecting a boot option, however, the system freezes after the following output:
Loading Linux linux ...
Loading initial ramdisk ...
_This is a new, minimal installation created by formatting and mounting the partitions (root and boot), pacstrapping the root partition, generating the fstab, and installing a bootloader according to the Arch Wiki Installation Guide.
When it is frozen, trying to switch to another tty does nothing and using fallback initramfs does not work. I have tried to use the linux-lts and linux-zen kernels as well. I have also tried to use the Arch Based Arch Labs as well to see if its autoinstaller would catch something I could not. It appears to have the same issue.
One interesting event that occurred when installing Arch was that I would repeatedly have text show up on screen seemingly through stderr saying something like
OT_FOUND (20200717/psargs-330)
[ 491.094321] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PC10.LPC0.EC0.APCL due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200717/psparse-529)
[ 491.094441] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PC10.LPC0.EC0.PCLK due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200717/psparse-529)
[ 491.094547] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PC10.LCP0.EC0._Q1D due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200717/psparse-529)
[ 491.614292] BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve symbol [\_PR.C002.PPCV, AE_NOT_FOUND (20200717/psargs-330)
[ 492.614292] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PC10.LPC0.EC0.APCL due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200717/psparse-529)
[ 492.614378] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PC10.LPC0.EC0.PCLK due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200717/psparse-529)
[ 492.618772] ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PC10.LCP0.EC0._Q1D due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200717/psparse-529) This did not affect the install process, but was quite annoying.
I have tried to use various kernel parameters in the GRUB menu by pressing e and adding things like "nomodeset", "debug", "ignore_loglevel", "acpi=off", etc. I would not get any output unless I used the "acpi=off" kernel parameter. Using things like "debug" in addition to "acpi=off" gave a lot of output, most of which is probably irrelevant, but if somebody thinks it's important, I can try to find a way to get it in here.
Here is the output from using the "acpi=off" kernel parameter on the fallback initramfs:
[ 0.466663] ehci-pci 0000:00:12.0: Found HC with no IRQ. Check BIOS/PCI 0000:
00:12.0 setup!
[ 0.466680] ehci-pci 0000:00:12.0: init 0000:00:12.0 fail, -19
:: running early hook [udev]
Starting version 247.4-2-arch
:: running hook [udev]
:: Triggering uevents...
Waiting 10 seconds for device /dev/disk/by-uuid/209eab61-93f9-47cc-aa82d8e22c963a1 ...
ERROR: device 'UUID=209eab61-93f9-47cc-aa82-d8e22c963a1' not found. Skipping fsck.
:: mounting 'UUID=209eab61-93f9-47cc-aa82-d8e22c963a1' on real rot
mount : /new_root: can't find UUID=209eab61-93f9-47cc-aa82-d8e22c963a1.
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.
sh: can't access tty: job control turned off
[rootfs ]# The acpi=off kernel paramter being necessary sort of makes sense because ACPI was mentioned in the errors which showed up on screen when installing Arch.
Since the output also mentioned a partition not being recognized, here is my partition layout and fstab:
parted /dev/sda printModel: ATA TOSHIBA MQ01ABF0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 556MB 555MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag
2 556MB 661MB 105MB fat32 EFI system partition boot, esp
3 661MB 677MB 16.8MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres
4 677MB 250GB 250GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata
6 250GB 253GB 2147MB fat32 boot, esp
5 363GB 500GB 137GB ext4 ArchLabs
/mnt/etc/fstab# Static information about the filesystems.
# See fstab(5) for details.
# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# /dev/sda5
UUID=209eab61-93f9-47cc-aa82-d84e22c963a1 / ext4 rw,relatime 0 1
# /dev/sda6
UUID=79EA-DA26 /boot vfat rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro 0 2The computer is a Lenovo Ideapad 130-15AST with 8GB of RAM and an AMD A9 processor, and I am dual booting with Windows 10, as shown in the partition layout above.
If there is any information I can provide that would be helpful to you, please let me know. I have tried everything I know to get this working short of asking here and I am left stumped.
Sincerely,
Nick
Last edited by nick_0189 (2021-03-30 06:40:59)
Offline
Hello again,
I've found a solution to my problem. Adding the "iommu=soft" kernel parameter in GRUB allows for the computer to boot without issue.
The computer I was working with apparently has a quirk with something called IOMMU (Input Output Memory Management Unit) and this quirk (from what I understand) is that some of the hardware of the computer cannot index memory beyond 3GB, and when the kernel tries to get the hardware to do that, it hangs (or something like that anyways, I really don't understand). So "IOMMU AMD Kernel parameter" is a helpful search query.
For now that solution is working nicely, I'll report back here if it there are unexpected problems that arise because of it. I'll mark the post as solved unless somebody has something to add.
Resources:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … -blank-ssd
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio … ptions.txt
https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/issues- … ing/5462/3
Offline
Hey Nick,
Thank you soooo much!
I've been suffered by this issue and "iommu=soft" resolved it, which made me more than happy!!
THANK YOU!
Offline