On Thu, Nov 23, 2023 at 4:09 PM Andy Dorman <[email protected]> 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
