computer freezes when updating pacman. (kernel update)

mrhooman · 2024-09-21 16:16:42

Hello,
about a month or two ago I put arch on my Chromebook in order to get around the predatory "auto update policy" that was stopping chrome OS updates. It works fine most of the time, but I have had a reoccurring issue that makes the system unbootable. When ever I update it with the typical 'pacman -Syu' and there is a update related to the kernel, the update fails horribly. it will go through all the steps like normal, but when it gets to "updating module dependencies" it freezes and become unresponsive to all inputs. The most recent time I let it sit for 8 hours while I slept, and it was still frozen when I got up. It may be a kernel panic, but because my laptop has no indicator lights not controlled by hardware, I can't tell. When I reboot it (by pressing and holding the power button) it will not boot because grub cannot find the kernel, saying I need to load a kernel first. I could only find one issue like this, and they said that there was not enough storage. after I saw that I reinstalled the system and for some reason archinstall will put home in one partition and everything else (the system) into a different partition with like 5mb of free space left. so I changed it so that they would both be in the same partition, and it happened again. I have arch on a USB that I boot into and plugging it into my main pc it shows that there are still over 200gb of space left. here are some bugs that show up sometimes that may be related. whenever I install or update packages and pacman 'updates the MIME type database' my cursor will temporarily turn into a large black square and (sometimes) my wallpaper will get stretched in a strange way. I will also get a notification from lxqt saying that the display settings have been updated. When shutting down about 60% of the time it shuts downs normally. 20% of the time it will get stuck trying to "stop session 2 of [my name]". 10% of the time it will get stuck in a loop printing hex saying cryptic error messages then doing something for about 10 seconds before starting the loop again. the last 10% of the time systemd will go through everything and then when it gets to the last step of actually shutting down the system it puts up a kernel panic message saying I tried to kill init.

I mostly dont want to have to reinstall my system a third time so I need help getting the kernel back. I do know how to chroot into the system if that is needed.

mrhooman · 2024-09-21 21:36:20

I have looked into it more using my main pc to analyze what happened and here is what I found.
1. there are logs from the time it happened, but they all cut off before anything noteworthy happens. all of them have extra (hex) zeros appended on to them with the systemd log having by far the biggest white space.
2. here is the output of pacman --sysroot /mnt -Qkk | grep -v ', 0 altered files' https://paste.ee/p/0YLbG

Arch Linux

#1 2024-09-21 16:16:42

computer freezes when updating pacman. (kernel update)

#2 2024-09-21 21:36:20

Re: computer freezes when updating pacman. (kernel update)

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