Re: Could Gnome's "install pending software updates" cause installation scripts to misbehave?
On Fri, Mar 29, 2024 at 12:01:27PM +0100, Lucas B. Cohen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've had a bit of a headache understanding why my Debian bookworm system
> suddenly panicked at boot with an 'unable to mount root fs' error. Turns out
> the first of my two menuentries in grub.cfg were no longer specifying the
> linux root by its device UUID (as I was expecting it to do, by honoring
> GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID != true) ; instead these menuentries were using the
> device node/file (/dev/md0 in this case, hence the kernel panic).
>
Was there any error message during the update?
I think what might have gone wrong, that you ran out of space on /boot.
> I've poured through the grub scripts a bit but they're quite complex. I've
> noticed that :
Yeah, don't do that. These files are all automatically managed.
All changes should be done in /etc/default/grub or in the config files in
/etc/default/grub.d
Then the grub config files are created by running
update-grub
>
> - uninstalling the second of two kernels caused the remaining one to
> correctly use the device UUID in grub.cfg ;
and that might have freed enough space on /boot.
So now everything works again :)
>
> - reinstalling that second kernel caused grub.cfg to use UUIDs in all
> menuentries, as expected.
>
> (Kernel were the two most recent stable ones: 6.1.0-17 and -18.)
>
> This leads me to suspect that my grub.cfg might have been damaged in the way
> described above because update-grub might have been called in some unusual,
> limited execution environment. I'd very recently powered off my system and
> let the default "install pending software updates" option checked by
> accident, which caused every updated package from the 12.5 release mark to
> be pulled. I'm guessing that linux-image-6.1.0-18 was part of it.
>
> Has anyone witnessed something similar? Would anyone here care to check this
> somehow? Or should I open a bug against gnome-desktop without waiting?
>
Usually it requires some trickery to install a new kernel on machines which
might not have enough remaining space on the boot partition.
For simple housekeeping it often is sufficient to run
apt autoremove
after recent updates (after you confirmed that the newly installed kernel
boots fine).
That usually frees enough space for a possible new update.
-H
--
Henning Follmann | hfollmann@itcfollmann.com
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