New laptop - Manjaro does not boot after BIOS update

Hi,

Today I received a new laptop on which I installed Manjaro from the latest minimal xfce iso available. One 512MB fat32 with /boot/efi, one ext4 mounted at /, and two other ext4, last 3 with encryption. Then booted into the OS, switched to the testing branch, and updated to kernel 5.15rc6.

I started a BIOS update by downloading the binary from the official website, and copied the unzipped directory to /boot/efi. Then rebooted into the BIOS utility and completed the update.

Once that finished, I received an error message regarding Secure Boot, and I realised that all the previous BIOS settings were restored to default. So I disabled Secure Boot again. Now the laptop no longer boots into the Manjaro os, freezing on a black screen with the text

os: recovering journal
os: clean, x/y files, z/w blocks.

The cursor beneath the text blinks a few times, then disappears. When booting from the USB drive into the manjaro ISO, the process gets stuck again, with all green OK messages until Starting Apply Kernel Variables... or sometimes Reached target Sound Card.

When rebooting, I do not see the GRUB menu either, probably the default settings are hiding it.

Could you please help me rescue the system?

Thanks

Hello,

Press quick the Esc or the Shift key right after the BIOS loads, and GRUB should be visible. Select the Advanced option

image

and then select the second option, fallback initramfs.

Or see if you have a snapshot (if you used btrfs), and see if one of those help to boot in the system.

If that does not work, try somehow to get the latest daily build ISO that already has the 5.15 kernel

1 Like

Thanks for the reply, @bogdancovaciu .
The second option fallback initramfs doesn’t work either, freezing at the same recovering journal screen.

In the meantime I flashed a SystemRescue ISO on the usb drive, booted with the default options, and it still hangs during the systemd status screen.

However, I noticed one option:
Boot SystemRescue using basic display drivers (nomodeset)
and this one finally boots into the OS.

So I went back to the Manjaro GRUB to add nomodeset as a boot option, and this time it seems to get one step further, it already asks me about the encryption password for the remaining unmounted partitions (is this a new behaviour in Manjaro? on my old laptop I don’t have to type the password at boot for the partitions without a mount point). But then the screen remains black with a blinking cursor in the top left.

Any idea what might cause this?

By the way, the laptop has a Ryzen 4000 CPU with integrated graphics.

I searched online for related issues on this laptop, and found a fix: set pci=noats as a kernel parameter.

List of related issues for future reference:

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/fb0-switching-to-amdgpudrmfb-from-efi-vga/152112
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-drivers/open-source-amd-linux/1150817-is-rx-5500-xt-supposed-to-work-on-linux-5-4-7
https://vcs.cs.uchicago.edu/kauffman/ubuntu-mainline-crack/commit/0561fce67014b0bc4294e9325bb5e60d704f7f4c
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1015

can you provide return of

inxi -Fza 

You mean ext4, isn’t it?

Yes, exactly, thanks for the correction

Sure, I am exporting a few entries, but happy to share more in private if you need to investigate further:

System:    Kernel: 5.15.0-1-MANJARO x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 11.1.0
           parameters: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.15-x86_64 root=UUID=<filtered> rw quiet pci=noats
           cryptdevice=UUID=<filtered>:luks-<filtered>
           root=/dev/mapper/luks-<filtered> udev.log_priority=3
           Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 tk: Gtk 3.24.29 info: xfce4-panel wm: xfwm 4.16.1 vt: 7 dm: LightDM 1.30.0
           Distro: Manjaro Linux base: Arch Linux

CPU:       Info: 6-Core model: AMD Ryzen 5 4500U with Radeon Graphics bits: 64 type: MCP arch: Zen 2 family: 17 (23)
           model-id: 60 (96) stepping: 1 microcode: 8600104 cache: L2: 3 MiB
           flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm bogomips: 28462
           Speed: 1397 MHz min/max: 1400/2375 MHz boost: enabled Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1397 2: 1397 3: 1397 4: 1397 5: 1397
           6: 1397
           Vulnerabilities: Type: itlb_multihit status: Not affected
           Type: l1tf status: Not affected
           Type: mds status: Not affected
           Type: meltdown status: Not affected
           Type: spec_store_bypass mitigation: Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp
           Type: spectre_v1 mitigation: usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
           Type: spectre_v2 mitigation: Full AMD retpoline, IBPB: conditional, IBRS_FW, STIBP: disabled, RSB filling
           Type: srbds status: Not affected
           Type: tsx_async_abort status: Not affected

Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Renoir vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: amdgpu v: kernel bus-ID: 03:00.0
           chip-ID: 1002:1636 class-ID: 0300
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 compositor: xfwm4 v: 4.16.1 driver: loaded: amdgpu,ati unloaded: modesetting
           alternate: fbdev,vesa display-ID: :0.0 screens: 1
           Screen-1: <filtered>
           Monitor-1: <filtered>
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD RENOIR (DRM 3.42.0 5.15.0-1-MANJARO LLVM 12.0.1) v: 4.6 Mesa 21.2.4 direct render: Yes

Info:      Processes: 239 Uptime: 14m wakeups: <> Memory: <filtered> GiB used: 1.5 GiB (<>%) Init: systemd v: 249 tool: systemctl
           Compilers: gcc: N/A Packages: pacman: 1014 lib: 351 Shell: Bash v: 5.1.8 running-in: xfce4-terminal inxi: 3.3.08