Failure to boot Fedora 38 Kernel 6.4.8-200

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1

I recently did a “dnf update” which updated the kernel to version 6.4.8-200. When that kernel is selected using grub, a kernel panic ensues:

Loading Linux 6.4.8-200.fc38.x86_64 ...
[    3.245722] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
[    3.245802] CPU: 49 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 6.4.8-200.fc38.x86_64 #1
[    3.245879] Hardware name: To Be Filled By O.E.M. To Be Filled By O.E.M./X399 Taichi, BIOS P3.90 12/04/2019
[    3.245956] Call Trace:
[    3.246016]  <TASK>
[    3.246074]  dump_stack_lvl+0x47/0x60
[    3.246142]  panic+0x192/0x350
[    3.246208]  mount_block_root+0x25b/0x2b0
[    3.246340]  prepare_namespace+0xf5/0x180
[    3.246340]  kernel_init_freeable+0x4a7/0x470
[    3.246406]  ? __pfx_kernel_init+0x10/0x10
[    3.246472]  kernel_init+0x1a/0x1c0
[    3.246535]  ret_from_fork+0x2c/0c50
[    3.246602]  </TASK>
[    3.247244] Kernel Offset: 0x22000000 from 0xffffffff81000000 (relocation range: 0xffffffff80000000-0xffffffffbfffffff)
[    3.247335] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) ]---

At this point the host is unresponsive and must be rebooted. I can use grub to load an earlier kernel and that works well.

Hardware:

Motherboard: ASRock X399 Taichi
CPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990W
RAM: 256 GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTC 2080 Super
OS: Fedora 38

I had drivers for the graphics card installed at the time, but have since removed them and tried reinstalling the kernel, but this didn’t clear up the error.

Any suggestions short of reinstalling the OS?

2

It turns out the grub config didn’t get updated correctly. Do the following:

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

More information is available from Fedora 38 not booting with kernel version > 6.4.6.

3

Even better –
Fedora released kernel 6.4.9 very quickly after the 6.4.8 kernel was released.
I would suggest that you upgrade again so it installs the 6.4.9 kernel and ignore the 6.4.8 kernel problems.

4

@computersavvy Thanks. After I got this working, I did just that, and made sure to run the grub2-mkconfig again afterwards. Not sure if I needed to, but after doing both, I rebooted just fine and was able to do so with the NVidia drivers reinstalled and running.