[SOLVED]Problematic upgrade to newest kernel 3.10.5-1

Question

Aloha, guys. I've just had a miserably failed upgrade to the latest kernel, probably due to something I had misconfigured and hadn't noticed before.
I was running 3.10 already perfectly before this last update to 3.10.5-1 (x86_64), but as soon as I rebooted after upgrading to the brand spanking new kernel, I got the fsck warning other people mentioned around this forum - corrected already in my syslinux.cfg by replacing ro with rw in the append line.
Both with ro and rw in the append line the boot process hangs (afterall, that fsck warning wouldn't stop the laptop from booting). The problem I'm having is that udev is not starting, meaning that boot hangs with lots of failed udev warnings.
The first one that comes up is "Failed to start udev Coldplug all Devices", and "Failed to start udev Kernel Device Manager" from then on until the boot process just hangs.
I've chrooted and tried rebuilding the initramfs, but it's giving me an "invalid kernel specified: 'boot/vmlinuz-linux'" error.
Right now I'm totally at a loss, as I cannot even begin to troubleshoot it any further. I hadn't kept the older kernel pkg in order to downgrade, but would like to try correcting this before eventually downgrading - as that just temporarily solves my problem.
My mkinitcpio hooks were "base udev autodetect modconf block filesystems keyboard fsck" and I've never had any previous problems with my initramfs. I know I may be missing something basic, or some further information needed to troubleshoot it, so please, please, please, just let me know and I will provide it here.
Any help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Last edited by Onyros (2013-08-07 21:03:54)

Answer 1

This must be something specific about your system - I have three machines running without any problem with kernel 3.10.5-1 - one uses the latest grub 2.00.5086-1, and the other two boot with rEFInd. All three boot fine and are stable.
Did you have any customisation in your mikinitcpio.conf or kernel parameters during boot?
In case it is of interest here is the output in my pacman log for the kernel update section:
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Starting build: 3.10.5-1-ARCH
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [base]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [udev]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [autodetect]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [modconf]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [block]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [filesystems]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [keyboard]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Generating module dependencies
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Creating gzip initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux.img
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Image generation successful
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Building image from preset: /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset: 'fallback'
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> -k /boot/vmlinuz-linux -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img -S autodetect
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Starting build: 3.10.5-1-ARCH
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [base]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [udev]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [modconf]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [block]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: bfa
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: aic94xx
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: smsmdtv
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [filesystems]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] -> Running build hook: [keyboard]
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Generating module dependencies
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Creating gzip initcpio image: /boot/initramfs-linux-fallback.img
[2013-08-07 13:23] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> Image generation successful
Last edited by mcloaked (2013-08-07 13:29:16)