Arch Linux

Malvineous

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2011-02-03

Posts: 193

Website

Diskless NFS boot broken recently (initramfs permissions changed)

I recently had my diskless machines running Arch Linux fail to boot.  Upon investigation, it turns out that recent mkinitcpio runs now mark the initramfs files as unreadable by non-root users:

$ ls
total 122M
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   6 2023-06-17 19:06 .
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root  13 2023-01-22 21:16 ..
drwxr-xr-x  8 root root  10 2021-10-25 03:59 grub
-rw-------  1 root root 91M 2023-06-17 19:00 initramfs-linux-fallback.img
-rw-------  1 root root 19M 2023-06-17 19:00 initramfs-linux.img
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 12M 2023-06-17 19:00 vmlinuz-linux

This means the TFTP server, which runs as non-root, is unable to read the files and so the PXE boot process fails.  To fix the problem I had to chmod 644 both initramfs files.

Is there a configuration option to prevent mkinitcpio from changing permissions on these files, so that PXE boot still works after an mkinitcpio run?  I had a look in the manpage and can't see anything, and the Diskless system page on the wiki doesn't seem to have any hints either.

rraumberger

Member

Registered: 2023-07-17

Posts: 1

Re: Diskless NFS boot broken recently (initramfs permissions changed)

I just created this account to say THANK YOU!
This problem has been bugging me since a very long time and I couldn't find the reason why none of my iSCSI devices came up after upgrading.

This seems to be the causing commit in mkinitcpio from what I can tell.
https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio … 13447f04c3

Malvineous

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2011-02-03

Posts: 193

Website

Re: Diskless NFS boot broken recently (initramfs permissions changed)

Nice find, thanks for that!  I logged a bug report in the hope that an option can be added to restore the old behaviour so that network booting Arch is still possible.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/79133

EDIT: New bug report: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/ … issues/199

Last edited by Malvineous (2023-07-22 03:16:08)