PSA: don't upgrade to linux kernel 5.19.12

little tip, most rolling distros have a “linux lts” package (linux-lts on arch) which you can install and if the main kernel ever gets broken like this, you can just select linux-lts in grub or whatever and run just fine while waiting for the fix.

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If you can’t boot. Instead of setting up a livecd, you can disable i915 during boot.

hit ‘e’ in the grub menu. and module_blacklist=i915

so I have

/vmlinuz-linux root=/dev/mapper/arch–lvm-arch–root rw module_blacklist=i915 …

Then hit ctrl-x to boot from the grub edit screen.

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I can’t boot even with a second display. My drive is encrypted. I have spammed ESC, SHIFT, F8, and SPACE in an attempt to open the grub menu and select an older kernel.

I opened my drive via cryptsecure on my Fedora installer usb. I went to my /root/etc/default/grub file and changed the grub timeout to 10 from 0. That changed nothing with how the booting process went.

I used chroot on my /root and proceeded to dnf remove the 5.19.12 kernel. I then followed Charles_Hill’s suggestion of adding an exclusion in /root/etc/dnf/dnf.conf. Running a dnf upgrade showed that dnf was skipping the 5.19.12. Running uname -r returned some other kernel version. This allowed me to plug in a second display, decrypt, and put me in emergency mode. I have no clue how to login to emergency mode and start giving commands.

I have hourly btrfs backups from before I did the dnf upgrade to the 5.19.12 that broke my computer. I don’t know how to use my backups… :upside_down_face:

If I can just run the rescue usb and switch my drive to the btrfs snapshot, that would be an option to fix it, correct? How can I do that, or how can I fix this whole ordeal?

EDIT: I have Fedora

Building off the Fedora workarounds mentioned here, after removing the the 5.19.2 kernel with:

sudo dnf remove kernel-core-5.19.12-200.fc36.x86_64

you can add an excludepkgs entry to your /etc/dnf/dnf.conf:

[main]
# ... other options ...
excludepkgs=kernel*

I’m actually going to leave this in indefinitely because I usually don’t want big kernel updates when I’m updating packages and I’m too lazy to type --exclude=kernel*. If I want to update the kernel I can run:

sudo dnf upgrade --disableexcludes main

https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/conf_ref.html

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Assuming 5.19.12 was actually removed and likely your default kernel is now 5.19.11, like mine (also Fedora), what happens when you boot? Do you still get the flickering?

If you’re still somehow booting with 5.19.12, when I was getting flickering I had to hard shutdown by holding the power button and then boot again and was show a list of kernel options in GRUB, can you select a working kernel via this method?

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I’m having the same problem on both my 11th gen and 12th gen laptop.
The screen flickers when it’s waiting for the LUKS password, however I can blindly type in the password and it boots correctly into GDM.

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For information I did a fresh install of Fedora 37 Beta on 16 September (on my 11th gen i5) and until reading this post have been unaware of any issues with the 5.19.12 kernel. It’s currently running fine on the Fedora 37 prerelease version, kernel 5.19.12-300.fc37.x86_64 - the only customizations being activation of fractional scaling and the noacmi=1 setting.

I also have Fedora 36 running on a Thinkpad ultrabook, and the kernel version there is 5.19.12-200.fc36.x86_64. So there is a minor difference between the kernel versions on 36 and 37.

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I can confirm that I have the issue with 5.19.12 on Slackware too! Using module_blacklist=i915 only helps me to get to runlevel 3 and using options does not help either. I have now downgraded to 5.19.11 currently.

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You can try adding init=/bin/bash to the end of the same kernel line. That should skip the runlevels.

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Thank you, maybe next time. I have downgraded the kernel and everything is working well for me.

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Just for easy reference for Arch, you can add linux linux-headers to the IgnorePkg line in /etc/pacman.conf to do something similar.

Personally, as recommended above, I have linux-lts (and also linux-mainline, which is still at 6.0rc7 atm in Arch AUR (6.0 just released about 12h ago).

(FYI, 6.0rc7 does not have any flickering for me on my 1260P, so I’d guess 6.0 will be fine.)

ive done a terrible writeup on my pain with this update Broken i915 - Keloran blog and random stuff

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That’s interesting to me. I’m also on Fedora 37 Beta with an 11th gen i5 and I am getting the issues. I had to exclude 5.19.12-300.

Kernel 6.0.0 confirmed working (dist and custom)

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If you’ve made the mistake of installing Linux 5.19, you can get it to boot with nomodeset on the kernel command line. If you are booting with systemd-boot, just press e on the bootloader screen and add nomodeset to the line before pressing enter. If you’re on 11th gen, and don’t need kernel features from the last few months right now, I recommend you stick to linux-lts. Right now, linux-lts on arch is linux 5.15 and works great. (just remember to update your bootloader entry to point to the linux-lts kernel and initrd)

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I am somehow booting with 5.19.12…? The startup message still says I’m booting 5.19.12. Which I think this attempt is causing the emergency mode to happen since I tried to remove it.

And I can’t get grub to show up or I don’t know how to. I’ve only been able to shutdown by holding the power button when it does its flicker stuff, and the grub menu hasn’t made an appearance. I’ve also tried spamming ESC, SHIFT, F8, and SPACE.

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Additionally, I have no root account for it to log into during emergency mode.

I get a “Press Enter to Continue Prompt” after it says: I’m in emergency mode and the root account is locked. Pressing enter starts the “default target” which results in the same messages.

EDIT: there’s also a 50/50 chance that I get a chain of about 30 “[FAILED] Failed to mount” messages before the aforementioned emergency mode messages. It starts with

[FAILED] Failed to mount boot -efi .mount - /boot/efi.

sounds like Fedora patches kernel? what is 300 and what is fc37

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just waiting someone to ship it Arch Linux - linux 6.8.2.arch1-1 (x86_64)

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I’m in! So I noticed the /root/boot was empty on my partition 3. Went and mounted partition 2 instead. It had /boot with a few kernels in it. I sudo rm -rf’ed everything I could that said 5.19.12 :laughing:

I rebooted, got a menu with only a selection for UEFI Firmware settings. Rebooted again, spammed ESC, hit a grub prompt, followed some advice Here:

# found grub2 via ls
ls (hd0, gpt2)
# then did these commands
set prefix=(hd0,gpt2)/grub2
set root=(hd0,gpt2)
insmod linux
insmod normal
normal

After “normal”, it put me at the grub kernel selection screen where this time I had a choice of 5.19.12, 11, 10 and UEFI Firmware. I selected my 5.19.11.

In an attempt to ensure this won’t happen if I reboot I have double checked the dnf remove on 5.19.12, I have excluded it, and I ran a dnf upgrade which said it was excluded. I also checked my grub.cfg settings were set to show the grub menu and ran:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Now I just hope I don’t have it break on next reboot