Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

[Christopher Baines]

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Hey,

So I deleted some system generations from one of my GuixSD systems, then
rebooted. Unfortunately, I can no longer get it to boot. I think the
latest system generation should work, and at least one of the previous
generations should work.

Excluding the generations that I removed, the others don't boot. All I
can really gather so far is a call stack, and the message:
  Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

I'm uncertain that this is something I have done wrong, I'm pretty sure
I was using the latest system generation when I ran guix gc, and I'm
assuming that it is the garbage collection that has stopped things working.

I'm going to try and make some time to see if I can get this system back
working again. I'm not sure how realistic this is, but I'm planning to
start by using the installation image, and somehow running  guix system
reconfigure.

Has anyone done anything similar before, or have any ideas about how
this happened, how to get more information out about why Linux panics,
or how to fix it?

Thanks,

Chris


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Re: Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:

> Excluding the generations that I removed, the others don't boot. All I
> can really gather so far is a call stack, and the message:
>   Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Has the label of your root partition changed?

-- 
Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6  2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC
https://elephly.net

Re: Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Christopher,

Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:

> So I deleted some system generations from one of my GuixSD systems, then
> rebooted. Unfortunately, I can no longer get it to boot. I think the
> latest system generation should work, and at least one of the previous
> generations should work.
>
> Excluding the generations that I removed, the others don't boot. All I
> can really gather so far is a call stack, and the message:
>   Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Weird.  Is it because the root file system could not be found?  Or
something else?  Like Ricardo wrote, could it be that the file system
label changed or something?

> I'm uncertain that this is something I have done wrong, I'm pretty sure
> I was using the latest system generation when I ran guix gc, and I'm
> assuming that it is the garbage collection that has stopped things working.

It’s unlikely.  You could have run ‘guix’ with a wrong database location
(see ‘--localstatedir’ in the manual), but even that wouldn’t have
reclaimed store items used by the processes currently running.

> I'm going to try and make some time to see if I can get this system back
> working again. I'm not sure how realistic this is, but I'm planning to
> start by using the installation image, and somehow running  guix system
> reconfigure.

I would suggest booting from an external medium such as the installation
image, mounting the file system that holds /gnu/store, and inspecting
there.

Also worth trying: you could edit the command line in the GRUB menu to
have it refer to /var/guix/profiles/system-NNN-link, where NNN is the
number of a previous generation known to be on disk.

HTH!

Ludo’.

Re: Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

[Christopher Baines]

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On 24/05/17 16:45, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:
> 
>> Excluding the generations that I removed, the others don't boot. All I
>> can really gather so far is a call stack, and the message:
>>   Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> 
> Has the label of your root partition changed?

I've just checked, and it doesn't seem to have changed.



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Re: Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

[Quiliro]

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I have had this same problem when garbage collecting on the root user. It happened to me twice. It was strange for me since I understood that Guix would NEVER remove any package that still had links to it.

What I did was try to boot with all entries presented on boot by GrUB. I usually found one that booted.

I am sorry I cannot reproduce this error since the 32 bit machine that I tryed garbage collecting previous generations on has died. I will test it on my other machines when I can manage to have a local substitute server to install offline from.

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Re: Kernel panic - not syncing: attempting to kill init! when booting GuixSD

[Christopher Baines]

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On 28/05/17 16:49, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hi Christopher,
> 
> Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> skribis:
> 
>> So I deleted some system generations from one of my GuixSD systems, then
>> rebooted. Unfortunately, I can no longer get it to boot. I think the
>> latest system generation should work, and at least one of the previous
>> generations should work.
>>
>> Excluding the generations that I removed, the others don't boot. All I
>> can really gather so far is a call stack, and the message:
>>   Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
> 
> Weird.  Is it because the root file system could not be found?  Or
> something else?  Like Ricardo wrote, could it be that the file system
> label changed or something?

Looking at the file system and configuration, it seems that this is
unlikely.

>> I'm going to try and make some time to see if I can get this system back
>> working again. I'm not sure how realistic this is, but I'm planning to
>> start by using the installation image, and somehow running  guix system
>> reconfigure.
> 
> I would suggest booting from an external medium such as the installation
> image, mounting the file system that holds /gnu/store, and inspecting
> there.
> 
> Also worth trying: you could edit the command line in the GRUB menu to
> have it refer to /var/guix/profiles/system-NNN-link, where NNN is the
> number of a previous generation known to be on disk.

I don't have the right cables to attempt to get a serial connection to
see what is going on in the early boot, so I tried running guix system
init from some GuixSD installation media. I'm glad to say that it worked :)

After running guix system init, I had a working system generation to
boot with.

I'll try to setup some kind of serial connection, so that I can attempt
to debug further if this happens again.

Thanks,

Chris



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