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Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable

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I have continued to research this and I think I found the problem.

I also think the dbus update timing mentioned in the subject is entirely 
coincidental. I hope I haven't caused any unnecessary excitement or work 
for anyone in the dbus package team. My apologies if I did.

A few months back we ran into a package conflict with the 
initramfs-tools that we have used since the beginning. I believe the 
conflict was with systemd, but I could be mis-rememberiung that.  We 
were able to switch to tiny-initramfs which did the same job (we 
thought) and didn't have a conflict.

Since that switch and before our recent problems, we rebooted one server 
which just happened to be different from all our others in that it hever 
had the initramfs package conflict and was still running the original 
initramfs package.

On a hunch (since I really have no clue about how debian boot actually 
works) I compared initram image file sizes and used lsinitramfs to list 
the content of the initram images built with tiny-initramfs and the 
standard initramsfs. The results:

- the tiny-initramfs image file size was under 1MB and lsinitramfs 
listed a very few modules to be loaded and specifcally NOT the 
piix4_smbus driver

- the standard intramfs image file was ~ 34MB and included the missing
> usr/lib/modules/6.5.0-4-amd64/kernel/drivers/i2c/busses/i2c-piix4.ko

So based on my very sketchy knowledge of Debeian boot and what I am 
seeing on our working servers, I think the problem is with 
tiny-initramfs not including the needed kernel driver modules in the 
image file OR our not understanding how to correctly use tiny-initramfs.

The fix as far as we are concerned with our servers that are running has 
been to switch back to the standard initramfs package (the previous 
conflict is gone now thank goodness) and rebuild the initram images, 
which we have done.

I have not yet figured out how to fix our two broken servers since we 
can't boot them to update them.  Since we have several identical running 
servers and can mount and manipulate the file system of the dead 
servers, is it possible to just copy a good initrd.img-6.5.0-4-amd64 to 
the dead server /boot directory and boot to that image? That sounds way 
too simple to me.

-- 
Andy Dorman
Ironic Design, Inc.
AnteSpam.com

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Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host  Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable Andy Dorman <adorman@ironicdesign.com> - 2023-11-23 14:30 +0100
  Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host  Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable Andy Dorman <adorman@ironicdesign.com> - 2023-11-23 22:10 +0100
    Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host  Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> - 2023-11-23 22:40 +0100
    Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host  Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable Tim Woodall <debianuser@woodall.me.uk> - 2023-11-24 05:20 +0100
      Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host  Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable Andy Dorman <adorman@ironicdesign.com> - 2023-11-24 15:00 +0100
      Re: Boot fails to load network or USB, piix4_smbus - SMBus Host  Controller, after update to dbus (1.14.10-3) unstable SOLVED Andy Dorman <adorman@ironicdesign.com> - 2023-11-25 17:20 +0100

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