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HCMC Journal

Ubuntu kernel upgrade borked my machine

: Martin Holmes
Minutes: 120

I’ve been running my new machine with Ubuntu 21.10 to get a preview of the next LTS, but that proved to have been a mistake today; booting first thing in the morning, I was unable to get past the decryption of the boot drive. After an hour and a half of messing around trying to figure it out, I determined that it was caused by the new kernel installed yesterday. Eventually I was able to get to a grub menu and boot the old kernel, which solved the problem, but what made it more difficult was what appears to be a bug in the UEFI bios which prevented me from setting a USB stick as the first boot drive.

For the moment, what I’ve done is to extend the grub menu timeout from 0 to 5. I’ll add my /etc/default/grub file here, because it also contains the special boot param that’s the workaround for the Intel graphics issue that hobbled this machine when we got it.

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.force_probe=4680"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"