I spent the better part of these past two weeks trying to recover my system (or more specifically, kernels 4.19 and 5.4) that were no longer booting into the DE. Without a more plausible explanation, it was looking like AUR broke fakeroot, which somehow broke them… Anyway…
In these forums, I found lots of advice, from editing the grub file to force legacy cgroup1 support, enabling different compression formats in mkinitcpio, to video driver reinstallation–all of which, it turns out, didn’t solve my problem.
I then found a thread on GitHub that did:
It seems that systemd updating from version 255.7-1 to 256 broke support for kernels 5.4 and, more rarely, 6.1.0 (on Arch Linux). By following the instructions to downgrade systemd, I have salvaged my school computer, where formatting and reinstalling Linux could not.
The only reason I found this was a search based on the one warning at image-making time that was different in 5.4 compared to other kernels, relating to missing DRM in platform/drivers. Seeing how obscure and painstaking it was for me to find, I thought I’d sign up and share.
Hi @Ktastrophe and welcome to the Manjaro community.
Thanks for your comments. I have moved this thread to the Feedback category, which seems more appropriate.
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Just checked up on the progress of this, since a lot of the chatter on GitHub seems to indicate it’s a case closed…
As of systemd v.256.5-1, my system is still failing to boot on kernel 5.4. I had to forcibly downgrade systemd again.
Thought someone should know!
That information might have been better added to your original post, don’t you think? Given that it wasn’t stated from the onset, it wasn’t quite as obvious as you suggest, was it?
Older machines do have difficulties keeping up with later technologies; that goes without saying. However, updating the BIOS (for example) can sometimes work wonders.
Did you even try updating the kernel; or, maybe you tried previously without success… that would at least explain the dismissiveness.
Old computers; they die sooner or later, despite us.
Call it age and experience then… and hardware. I get random lockups with 5.10 and newer. Or I did in XFCE.
(Hardware and version is all in my profile btw)
So I think YMMV.
Something is really bothering you I get it, along with some others; the tune really changes after the initial welcome message. I don’t think I’ll come to these forums anymore. Cheers
We can’t possibly help anyone who refuses to help themselves.
You were given a possible workaround. From the lack of information in your responses we can only summise that you didn’t bother to try them.
Now, you write a response such as this in an attempt to shift the focus from your oversight to playing the victim. Why, when you could simply admit that you didn’t mention the age of your machine, and move on from that?
If you don’t believe that updating your kernel might help, you could simply say that, and give reasons why you think so. Nobody here is a mind-reader – we cannot automatically know what is in hour head, until you actually communicate it.
This conclusion, apart from being strategically insulting, is invalid; as is your assumption that anything bothers me, except for your obvious arrogance.
If assistance or suggestions will be accepted gracefully, then you are most welcome. If not, then there are many phrases that ultimately translate to “it’s no skin off my nose”.
For the record: I’ve found that the later iterations of the linux61 and linux66 kernels are pretty good with my ancient Lenove T440 ThinkPad (based on 4th-gen i5) and a slightly newer IdeaPad.
Fixes have been incorporated into newer kernels even for these older machines e.g. trackpad issues, etc. .
Is there a particular reason to use systemd-boot rather than regular GRUB?
Usually using the latest kernel provides the best result no matter the hardware.
Whether one chose to use one or another bootloader should not matter.
If one only boots a single operating system on a single kernel then systemd-boot is a good choice.
My laptops does not use a traditional boot bootloader, instead it loads using a unified efi-stub (registered in Secure Boot) to boot an encrypted system.
That’s the thing, though … usually. I had issues with the linux67 kernel series and had to abandon it and also had an issue with 6.6.26-1; during this time I reverted to linux61 until 6.6.31 or whatever it was.
No harm in trying different ones (and keeping a “spare” or two for fallback purposes).
