Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 536676
incomplete/truncated initrd when /boot is very close to full
Last modified: 2010-12-03 22:24:27 EST
I attempted to preupgrade from F11 to F12 (currently rawhide) on a KVM guest with a very full /boot. (Note that due to the increased size of the F12 installer images and dracut-created initrd, this is a fairly common case.) Since /boot was so close to full, anaconda at first refused to perform the upgrade, saying 8MB more space was needed. After running 'tune2fs -r 0 /dev/vda1' anaconda ran successfully. There were no scriptlet errors in /root/upgrade.log. On reboot, the following messages appeared: RAMDISK: incomplete write (22893 != 32768) write error Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) which seems to indicate a problem unpacking/finding the initrd. I retrieved the initrd and attempted to examine it, which led to some gzip/cpio errors: gzip: /tmp/initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64.img: invalid compressed data--crc error gzip: /tmp/initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.x86_64.img: invalid compressed data--length error cpio: premature end of file My guess is that some part of the initrd creation process did not check for sufficient free space and/or ignored an error about running out of space on the device.
With a /boot filesystem it is too easy to end up with a bad upgrade for want of space. preupgrade-gtk and friends should check if /boot is an isolated filesystem and then check if it has sufficient space for preupgrade tricks. This applies to both a fc10-2-fc11 and an fc11-2-fc12 upgrade. With changes to grub and since this is an easy check and since failure to notice the problem results in a badly broken system the priority should be improved. Example of what used to be a 'big enough' /boot and why it is not. $ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 273G 130G 129G 51% / tmpfs 1.8G 276K 1.8G 1% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02 20G 189M 19G 2% /tmp /dev/sda1 190M 158M 23M 88% /boot $ du -s /boot/* 95 /boot/config-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64 228 /boot/efi 118 /boot/elf-memtest86+-2.11 389 /boot/grub 3632 /boot/initrd-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64.img 13 /boot/lost+found 116 /boot/memtest86+-2.11 1721 /boot/System.map-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64 146590 /boot/upgrade 3196 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64 $
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database. Reassigning to the new owner of this component.
Still happens preupgrade-1.1.5-1.fc12.
but see bug 573451
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Fedora 12 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2010-12-02. Fedora 12 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.