Arch Linux

hirak99

Member

Registered: 2023-11-04

Posts: 11

boot failure after full upgrade (recovered, unclear why it happened)

Fyi, I have already recovered. I wanted to log this, as I do not understand what failed.

11:07:16 - I start pacman -Syu like I did million times
11:10:06 - pacman -Syu completes successfully
11:10:12 - I run `reboot`. The log stops at `System is rebooting.`, but laptop does not reboot. This has happened a few times before since last 1-2 months, so I forcefully reboot.
11:11:17 - Boot failure. `mount: /boot: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'.`

I was unable to recover from init=/bin/bash, since it didn't appear to have vfat either.

I used an arch install USB, and found a weird issue while running `pacman -Syu` -
`/etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset`  has size 0. This has an mtime of 11:09:51, so I'm guessing something happened during the update?

To not risk it I ran `pacman -Syu` from a recent snapshot. Preserved the old root in a ro subvolume for now.

So I have the system recovered, more or less painlessly.

However, I do not know how it happened, why the upgrade failed. And if I should be worried about this instability. Writing this post in case someone has any thoughts.

The zeroing out of linux.preset may be a clue. Here are the entries from journal log around that time -

```
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd[1055]: Reloading...
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd[1055]: Reloading finished in 99 ms.
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_core: Failed to open /dev/dri/renderD128 device (No such device)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at "/dev/dri/renderD128"
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd[1055]: Reached target Sound Card.
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro boltd[714]: [d8a13804-a0f7-Legion 5 Pro 16ARH7H       ] udev: device changed: authorized -> authorized
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_core: Failed to open /dev/dri/renderD129 device (No such device)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at "/dev/dri/renderD129"
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd[1055]: Reached target Bluetooth.
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kwin_wayland[1094]: kwin_wayland_drm: failed to open drm device at ""
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd-logind[717]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event1 (Lid Switch)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd-logind[717]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event0 (Power Button)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd-logind[717]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event4 (ITE Tech. Inc. ITE Device(8910) Keyboard)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kernel: BTRFS info: devid 1 device path /dev/mapper/luksdev changed to /dev/dm-0 scanned by (udev-worker) (4401)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro kernel: BTRFS info: devid 1 device path /dev/dm-0 changed to /dev/mapper/luksdev scanned by (udev-worker) (4401)
Aug 25 11:09:49 legion5pro systemd-logind[717]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event2 (AT Raw Set 2 keyboard)
Aug 25 11:09:51 legion5pro wpa_supplicant[918]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SIGNAL-CHANGE above=1 signal=-54 noise=9999 txrate=115600
Aug 25 11:09:51 legion5pro kded6[1262]: org.kde.colorcorrectlocationupdater: Geolocator stopped
Aug 25 11:09:54 legion5pro wpa_supplicant[918]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SIGNAL-CHANGE above=1 signal=-59 noise=9999 txrate=130000
Aug 25 11:09:57 legion5pro wpa_supplicant[918]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SIGNAL-CHANGE above=1 signal=-48 noise=9999 txrate=130000
```

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 71,649

Re: boot failure after full upgrade (recovered, unclear why it happened)

11:11:17 - Boot failure. `mount: /boot: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'.`

This typically happens because the booted and installed kernel are out of sync which generally happens when you're booting from a dedicated /boot partition but forgot to mount that before the update or mounted something there but are actually not booting from that partition.

mount
cat /proc/cmdline

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