Rocky 9.2 on a Dell Optiplex 5090 and a 256G Hynix nvme storage.
Booting to kernel-5.14.0-162.18.1 has always worked fine and was installed initially when I first set up this system. Two different kernel updates (5.14.0-284.30.1, 5.14.0-284.25.1), have resulted in a system that consistently boots to emergency mode and can’t see the physical volume, volume group or logical volumes. I’ve tried to boot the original kernel and then rebuild the initramfs for all three but that hasn’t worked. I’m not sure at this point it actually is the initramfs but it seems the likely cause right now.
How can I find out where the kernel updates are failing so I can get them working correctly?
Do you have any command line options that you amended to the original kernel via /etc/default/grub? If so and these are necessary to find devices on your system then that could be the issue. RH documentation expects the sysadmin to run “grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg” after each new kernel install to apply any added kernel parameters.
If you are not sure compare the boot entries for the original kernel and the new kernels. These can be found in /boot/loader/entries/
There’s a thread on this that I’ll have to search and can post back later if you find the above relevant.
There’s nothing different in the command line options for any of the kernels currently installed.
Rebooted and removed rhgb and quiet from the command, system hangs for a bit when it’s trying to activate the logical volume where my home directory resides and then gets into emergency mode. I commented that filesystem from /etc/fstab and can get it to boot to the latest kernel now. I think the lvm devices config isn’t right. Gotta figure out how to rebuild all that so new kernels will have the config in initramfs correctly.
Found the problem, RH bugzilla 2208039. Not an initramfs problem after all.
Had to boot into the older kernel, delete /etc/lvm/devices/system.devices, reboot to the latest kernel and then regenerate that file with vgimportdevices --all.
It was apparently a bug that got introduced between rocky 9.1 and 9.2.