SOLVED, solution available below. Solution almost found entirely in this thread, helped by redhat, included missing steps for newbies unable to solve issue from this thread.
I think the nvidia came with fedora? I was apoligizing since generally I’ve been told necroing threads older than 3 months is bad form, so I decided to go submit a bug report with redhat. They told me the issue was the digimend dkms module (from the logs I showed them about dkms failing), and I uninstalled it after How to Uninstall DKMS Module on Fedora 35 • tutorialforlinux.com this guy showed me how to alter dkms, and man dkms command showed me how to use dkms. I bring this information back for anyone else who may need it.
But first, the new inquiry - I looked on the website for AMD to try and figure out if I can download any modules/drivers (one time my friend told me never to search drivers linux because all results would be cursed and linux has all the drivers it needs, apparently the magic word is modules! search that instead if you keep getting cursed results from drivers as a keyword) from there for my graphics card, but they only have ubuntu linux for my graphics card, do you know how I can get one for AMD or convert that one to be usable with fedora workstation? I am sorry I don’t actually understand the thing you were telling me Jeff.
@computersavvy what does this mean? can you say it more simply? Wait I see you saying that I should not mess with it - do you know a way I can get the software for my actual hardware, or would that just mess things up?
I’m going to share that process below. first quote is what told the kind people at redhat what my problem was, an unsupported module for dkms, and I only found these logs by following Justin Strunk’s tutorial thing.
“While nvidia is often a culprit because it is the most common module that people are building with dkms, your logs clearly show the culprit is the digimend module. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this as Fedora or the kernel package. I would assume digimend just has not been updated to build with 6.14 yet. That is an unfortunate side effect of out of tree modules. You will need to file a bug or support request where you got your digimend module from, or remove that dkms module.” -Justin the amazing redhat.
I’ll add the missing steps afterwards at “placeholder B” that I was too much of a newbie to intuit that is probably easy for experienced people, because this thread almost had me solve the issue on my own. @pg-tips I don’t really know what digimend is either- but I figured out how to remove it at placeholder B down below the info I gave redhat. It’s not a real thing, just control f that phrase if you wanna skip some logs I might have already shared here in this thread.
$ systemctl restart dkms
Job for dkms.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status dkms.service" and "journalctl -xeu dkms.service" for details.
~$ sudo systemctl status dkms.service
[sudo] password for :
× dkms.service - Builds and install new kernel modules through DKMS
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/dkms.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
└─10-timeout-abort.conf
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2025-05-18 18:37:59 MDT; 48s ago
Invocation: 73de0ea12268406fabef1aa712200c6c
Docs: man:dkms(8)
Process: 41563 ExecStart=/usr/bin/dkms autoinstall --verbose --kernelver 6.14.5>
Main PID: 41563 (code=exited, status=11)
Mem peak: 518.5M
CPU: 1.722s
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41680]: (bad exit status: 2)
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41955]: Error! Bad return status for module build on >
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41955]: Consult /var/lib/dkms/digimend/13/build/make.>
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41563]: Autoinstall on 6.14.5-300.fc42.x86_64 failed >
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41956]: Error! One or more modules failed to install >
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41956]: Refer to previous errors for more information.
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Main process exited, code=exited>
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: Failed to start dkms.service - Builds and inst>
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Consumed 1.722s CPU time, 518.5M>
lines 1-22/22 (END)...skipping...
× dkms.service - Builds and install new kernel modules through DKMS
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/dkms.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
└─10-timeout-abort.conf
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2025-05-18 18:37:59 MDT; 48s ago
Invocation: 73de0ea12268406fabef1aa712200c6c
Docs: man:dkms(8)
Process: 41563 ExecStart=/usr/bin/dkms autoinstall --verbose --kernelver 6.14.5>
Main PID: 41563 (code=exited, status=11)
Mem peak: 518.5M
CPU: 1.722s
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41680]: (bad exit status: 2)
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41955]: Error! Bad return status for module build on >
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41955]: Consult /var/lib/dkms/digimend/13/build/make.>
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41563]: Autoinstall on 6.14.5-300.fc42.x86_64 failed >
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41956]: Error! One or more modules failed to install >
May 18 18:37:59 dkms[41956]: Refer to previous errors for more information.
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Main process exited, code=exited>
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: Failed to start dkms.service - Builds and inst>
May 18 18:37:59 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Consumed 1.722s CPU time, 518.5M>
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
~
:~$ journalctl -xeu dkms.service
░░
░░ The job identifier is 8245.
May 18 18:42:19 dkms[42303]: Sign command: /lib/modules/6.14.5-300.fc42.x8>
May 18 18:42:19 dkms[42303]: Signing key: /var/lib/dkms/mok.key
May 18 18:42:19 dkms[42303]: Public certificate (MOK): /var/lib/dkms/mok.p>
May 18 18:42:19 dkms[42303]: Autoinstall of module digimend/13 for kernel >
May 18 18:42:19 dkms[42434]: make -j16 KERNELRELEASE=6.14.5-300.fc42.x86_6>
May 18 18:42:20 dkms[42434]: (bad exit status: 2)
May 18 18:42:20 dkms[42709]: Error! Bad return status for module build on >
May 18 18:42:20 dkms[42709]: Consult /var/lib/dkms/digimend/13/build/make.>
May 18 18:42:20 dkms[42303]: Autoinstall on 6.14.5-300.fc42.x86_64 failed >
May 18 18:42:20 dkms[42710]: Error! One or more modules failed to install >
May 18 18:42:20 dkms[42710]: Refer to previous errors for more information.
May 18 18:42:20 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Main process exited, code=exited>
░░ Subject: Unit process exited
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
░░
░░ An ExecStart= process belonging to unit dkms.service has exited.
░░
░░ The process' exit code is 'exited' and its exit status is 11.
May 18 18:42:20 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
░░ Subject: Unit failed
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
░░
░░ The unit dkms.service has entered the 'failed' state with result 'exit-code'.
May 18 18:42:20 systemd[1]: Failed to start dkms.service - Builds and inst>
░░ Subject: A start job for unit dkms.service has failed
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
░░
░░ A start job for unit dkms.service has finished with a failure.
░░
░░ The job identifier is 8245 and the job result is failed.
May 18 18:42:20 systemd[1]: dkms.service: Consumed 1.720s CPU time, 518.6M>
░░ Subject: Resources consumed by unit runtime
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
░░
░░ The unit dkms.service completed and consumed the indicated resources.
lines 101-141/141 (END)
“Placeholder B” This has the missing in between steps that might help you if the entire answer isn’t revealed from the earlier thing to you. Redhat, and other experienced people could likely get the entire issue from the earlier error codes but they just left me confused so I’m gonna fill in the blanks. I went to redhat knowing something was wrong in the dkms probably, or there was a critical kernal errror since lots of others had the same issue. Redhat said its the dkms and they can’t do anything, but they told me there is a module affecting the dkms so I got the idea to search about how to remove modules and that guy on linked in and the man command helped. Man seems to be the “oh man I’m really stuck in the code and don’t know what’s going on” and you should probably do man (wierd command like dkms) or man man to learn basic programming stuffs. It worked for me. This is just the links to … David Ganz? his tutorial on linux. it solved the issue for me, so this is the linkedin page, then the page to the tutorial. Including to attribute credit or something.
a command exists, dkms status and I don’t know if I got lucky because I remember for the past few days sometimes my terminal would tell me that dkms doesn’t exist probably because it was broken… anyways today it worked. I did do the bandaid fix of sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force yesterday before hopefully fixing the root issue today.
~$ dkms status
digimend/13: added
~$ man -w digimend/13
man: digimend/13: No such file or directory
No manual entry for digimend/13
So that told me that digimend is definitely the problem, I also remember using the -w command to find and being unable to find over and over the digimend, but that command David suggested told me it was in the dkms. Also I was unable to find dkms in my files either. Skipping various help me man commmands until I got to the right one,
~$ man dkms
This opened me up to a page showing all of the commands involved with man, to quit out I had to press q when it was done loading at the bottom. (I’m including this information because it was one of the newbie stumbling blocks, solution: pressing q on a terminal page to get back the input line solves losing all the information the terminal gave me by exiting that terminal page)
:~$ dkms remove digimend/13
Error! No write access to DKMS tree at /var/lib/dkms
:~$ sudo dkms remove digimend/13
[sudo] password for :
Module digimend/13 is not installed for kernel 6.14.6-300.fc42.x86_64 (x86_64). Skipping...
Module digimend/13 is not built for kernel 6.14.6-300.fc42.x86_64 (x86_64). Skipping...
Deleting module digimend/13 completely from the DKMS tree.
:~$ dkms status
:~$ systemctl restart dkms
:~$ systemctl status dkms.service
● dkms.service - Builds and install new kernel modules through DKMS
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/dkms.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Drop-In: /usr/lib/systemd/system/service.d
└─10-timeout-abort.conf
Active: active (exited) since Mon 2025-05-19 13:05:40 MDT; 16s ago
Invocation: 80a30d2847e6487096697c3f58d65f0c
Docs: man:dkms(8)
Process: 8711 ExecStart=/usr/bin/dkms autoinstall --verbose --kernelver 6.14.6->
Main PID: 8711 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Mem peak: 21.8M
CPU: 61ms
May 19 13:05:40 systemd[1]: Starting dkms.service - Builds and install new>
May 19 13:05:40 systemd[1]: Finished dkms.service - Builds and install new>
and above are the missing newbie steps from knowing something is wrong with dkms from this thread, the thing wrong preventing initramfs from being made by dkms during kernel updates, dkms having an X indicating it does not work despite being enabled, to figuring out what module/driver is outdated and preventing fedora workstation 42 from generating initramfs with the grub issue.
Ah I’m gonna include the original error code from way back when the grub first had problems so people can search this better
error: ../../grub-core/fs/fshelp.c:257:file `/initramfs-6.13.9-200.fc41.x89_64.img' not found.
Press any key to continue..
KERNEL PANIC!
Please reboot your computer.
VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
Then restart to select different kernels from a screen headered Grub version 2.12 with the rescue boot and the latest update not working. Bandaid fix to the above is sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force but you’re gonna want to figure out why it’s a problem to generate initramfs after your computer works again.