Failed boot in Fedora 36 EVEusb

Hi everyone!

After installing a clean installation of Fedora 36 (upgrade failed due to trying to set into nvidia drivers :_), my system is fine now.

However, it just ran into a black screen after logging in and booting, two times in a row. The third time, it was fine.

The console log is

a05cbf4960d8bbea17099f810d58425dc4cb7f92.png

EVEusb is related to a USB ethernet connector I had plugged, probably? However, it was only plugged in the first boot.

I am just asking about more details of this in case I have a faulty system because of some tweaks, or in case there is a bug somewhere.

Best regards,
Miguel

A kernel is marked tainted after something occurs that might be worth investigating later. I guess the 2 black screens are responsible for this.

More info: Tainted kernels — The Linux Kernel documentation

If it’s a fresh install, you could try reinstalling with all unnecessary hardware disconnected.

A kernel is marked tainted after loading an unsigned kernel module, thus is running in a condition that is not 100% verified by the kernel signer.

That’s not how I understand these paragraphs on kernel.org:

Tainted kernels

The kernel will mark itself as ‘tainted’ when something occurs that might be relevant later when investigating problems. Don’t worry too much about this, most of the time it’s not a problem to run a tainted kernel; the information is mainly of interest once someone wants to investigate some problem, as its real cause might be the event that got the kernel tainted. That’s why bug reports from tainted kernels will often be ignored by developers, hence try to reproduce problems with an untainted kernel.

Note the kernel will remain tainted even after you undo what caused the taint (i.e. unload a proprietary kernel module), to indicate the kernel remains not trustworthy. That’s also why the kernel will print the tainted state when it notices an internal problem (a ‘kernel bug’), a recoverable error (‘kernel oops’) or a non-recoverable error (‘kernel panic’) and writes debug information about this to the logs dmesg outputs. It’s also possible to check the tainted state at runtime through a file in /proc/ .

So, if I understand your input correctly, the kernel being tainted is the reason so the issue cannot be reported, or further debugged, right?

My kernel was tainted because of this:

[callejonm@fedora Desktop]$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/tainted
12288
[callejonm@fedora Desktop]$ ./kernel-chktaint
Kernel is "tainted" for the following reasons:
 * externally-built ('out-of-tree') module was loaded  (#12)
 * unsigned module was loaded (#13)
For a more detailed explanation of the various taint flags see
 Documentation/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.rst in the Linux kernel sources
 or https://kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.html
Raw taint value as int/string: 12288/'G           OE    '

In particular, I am afraid the module that tainted it is eveusb… maybe related to this? FAQ - USB over Ethernet Connector for Linux

And my system again booted twice into a black screen for the third time to boot normally :smiling_face_with_tear: