Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable
On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 4:09 PM Andy Dorman <adorman@ironicdesign.com> wrote:
>
> I have continued to research this and I think I found the problem.
>
> I also think the dbus update timing mentioned in the subject is entirely
> coincidental. I hope I haven't caused any unnecessary excitement or work
> for anyone in the dbus package team. My apologies if I did.
>
> A few months back we ran into a package conflict with the
> initramfs-tools that we have used since the beginning. I believe the
> conflict was with systemd, but I could be mis-rememberiung that. We
> were able to switch to tiny-initramfs which did the same job (we
> thought) and didn't have a conflict.
>
> Since that switch and before our recent problems, we rebooted one server
> which just happened to be different from all our others in that it hever
> had the initramfs package conflict and was still running the original
> initramfs package.
>
> On a hunch (since I really have no clue about how debian boot actually
> works) I compared initram image file sizes and used lsinitramfs to list
> the content of the initram images built with tiny-initramfs and the
> standard initramsfs. The results:
>
> - the tiny-initramfs image file size was under 1MB and lsinitramfs
> listed a very few modules to be loaded and specifcally NOT the
> piix4_smbus driver
>
> - the standard intramfs image file was ~ 34MB and included the missing
> > usr/lib/modules/6.5.0-4-amd64/kernel/drivers/i2c/busses/i2c-piix4.ko
>
> So based on my very sketchy knowledge of Debeian boot and what I am
> seeing on our working servers, I think the problem is with
> tiny-initramfs not including the needed kernel driver modules in the
> image file OR our not understanding how to correctly use tiny-initramfs.
>
> The fix as far as we are concerned with our servers that are running has
> been to switch back to the standard initramfs package (the previous
> conflict is gone now thank goodness) and rebuild the initram images,
> which we have done.
>
> I have not yet figured out how to fix our two broken servers since we
> can't boot them to update them. Since we have several identical running
> servers and can mount and manipulate the file system of the dead
> servers, is it possible to just copy a good initrd.img-6.5.0-4-amd64 to
> the dead server /boot directory and boot to that image? That sounds way
> too simple to me.
According to <https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-server-73/copying-initrd-img-file-to-different-server-4175414604/>,
you cannot copy initrd.img from one machine to another.
Maybe you can boot to a live CD, and then regenerate initrd.img for the machine?
Jeff
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