Boot stucks at "Loading initial ramdisk"

[Dileep Sankhla]

On Fri, Dec 22, 2023 at 5:07 PM Dileep Sankhla <dileepsankhla.ds at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Soumya,
>
> On Fri, Dec 22, 2023 at 2:24 PM Soumya Negi <soumya.negi97 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Dileep,
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 05:58:23PM +0530, Dileep Sankhla wrote:
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > I have cloned and built the latest rc kernel using the default config
>> but
>> > on boot, it stucks at "Loading initial ramdisk". I have tried booting
>> after
>> > removing the "quiet" option from the kernel parameters just before
>> > selecting the kernel from the grub menu. I have also tried adding
>> > "dis_ucode_ldr" parameter to the initial parameters but all in vain.
>> >
>> > How to look for the underlying issue and solve it?
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > Dileep
>>
>> I had this issue as well. I found a solution on stackexchange(..I think)
>> that I wanted to link here.. but can't seem to find it now. For
>> reference, I
>> was using Ubuntu. This was my case:
>>
>> * Possible reason - initrd.img file is too large
>> I checked the size of initrd.img-<kernel name> at /boot. The file was
>> ~500mb,
>> much larger than the initrd for the kernel that came with Ubuntu(~40mb)
>>
>> * Possible solution -
>> Before installing the kernel, change  MODULES=most to MODULES=dep  in
>> /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to generate smaller initrd.img files.
>> The new initrd's for all other kernels I have installed afterwards have
>> been
>> ~55MB.
>>
>
> Thanks for your solution. Mine is fine in size and I am already using
> MODULES=dep.
>

Sorry, my bad. I thought 18M was good enough but after asking this on
LinuxQuestions.org, I got to know that it was not sufficient for the boot
success (see [1]). Copying the existing kernel version's config from
`/boot` and running `make olddefconfig` solved the size issue for me. It is
now ~78M. The size of the kernel's initrd that I was using earlier is ~71M.


>> Regards,
>> Soumya Negi
>
>
> Regards,
> Dileep.
>


Regards,
Dileep

[1]:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/boot-freezes-at-loading-initial-ramdisk-4175732025/#post6472047
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/attachments/20240101/f339bd1b/attachment.html>