Arch Linux

lobotomiteqt5

Member

Registered: 2026-01-02

Posts: 13

[SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

Ive been using arch for not a very long time and its the first time i couldnt solve an issue with a simple search,
at first since 6.17.7 til 6.17.9 my kernel had booting issue, which was mounting /boot on boot, was easily solved with booting arch installation usb and remaking initcpio image
now, when i try to upgrade the kernel it gets stuck on start job for /dev/zram0, after that it boots completely fine, but into 6.17.9 and not into 6.18.2, also, i have no internet.
i do not know which logs or command outputs to share here please tell me in replies

Last edited by lobotomiteqt5 (2026-01-03 19:58:22)

gromit

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From: Germany

Registered: 2024-02-10

Posts: 1,523

Website

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

Is there any visible error or something in the last journal ("sudo journalctl --dmesg -b-1")?

lobotomiteqt5

Member

Registered: 2026-01-02

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

it looks like it didnt even see 6.18.2 and is identical to my current boot, after i downgraded to working version ("Linux version 6.17.9-arch1-1 (linux@archlinux)" in both -b and -b-1)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,063

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

You're either booting from a dedicated partition and forgot to mount it into /boot before updating or are booting from the root partition and mount a spurious partition there.

cat /proc/cmdline

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lobotomiteqt5

Member

Registered: 2026-01-02

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

im not sure what is xinitrc going to do since i boot into tty by default and have no xorg desktop environments installed

BOOT_IMAGE=/@/boot/vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d rw rootflags=subvol=@ zswap.enabled=0 rootfstype=btrfs loglevel=3

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,063

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

The four links at the bottom are my signature…

You're booting from a btrfs subvolume, so what do

lsblk -f
btrfs subvolume list -t /boot

look like before you're updating?

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lobotomiteqt5

Member

Registered: 2026-01-02

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

sdb                                                                               
├─sdb1 vfat   FAT32           C110-EE23                             933.1M     9% /boot
└─sdb2 btrfs        Lee Nucks 8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d    126G    46% /var/cache/pacman/pkg
                                                                                  /var/log
                                                                                  /home
                                                                                  /.snapshots
                                                                                  /
ERROR: not a btrfs filesystem: /boot
ERROR: can't access '/boot'

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,063

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

Because you're mounting some irrelevant FAT32 partition there.

# umount /boot
# pacman -Syu linux

And fix your fstab.

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lobotomiteqt5

Member

Registered: 2026-01-02

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

thank you so much stranger, now i have grub in /efi and kernel with initramfs in /boot
this is my fstab now
# Static information about the filesystems.
# See fstab(5) for details.

# <file system> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# /dev/sdb2
UUID=8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d    /             btrfs         rw,relatime,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=/@    0 0

# /dev/sdb2
UUID=8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d    /.snapshots    btrfs         rw,relatime,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=/@.snapshots    0 0

# /dev/sdb2
UUID=8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d    /home         btrfs         rw,relatime,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=/@home    0 0

# /dev/sdb2
UUID=8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d    /var/cache/pacman/pkg    btrfs         rw,relatime,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=/@pkg    0 0

# /dev/sdb2
UUID=8035711a-2052-47fd-8acd-f64f9142f00d    /var/log      btrfs         rw,relatime,compress=zstd:3,ssd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=/@log    0 0

# /dev/sdb1
UUID=C110-EE23          /efi         vfat          rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro    0 2

# /dev/sda2
UUID=4b66acbd-bddd-4b61-9ffb-5acf4639b380 /hdd ext4 defaults 0 2
i forgot to send this message yesterday for some reason, i wrote the thing but then closed the website

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,063

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

Please use [code][/code] tags. Edit your post in this regard.

After installing the kernel into the proper location, does the updated kernel now boot ("uname -a") and everything work as expected?
In case and please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

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lobotomiteqt5

Member

Registered: 2026-01-02

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

$ uname -a
Linux archlinux 6.18.2-arch2-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:00:18 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 75,063

Re: [SOLVED] 6.18.2 Kernel refuses to boot

\o/

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