Upgrade Fedora 42, Kernel panic exitcode=0x00007f00, broken systemd

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1

Hi,
after upgrading to Fedora 42 I was stuck with a Kernel panic exitcode=0x00007f00, even for the older existing kernels from Fedora 41 … systemd install of version 257.3-7 turned out to be corrupted. When booting from live media and chroot, I couldn’t reinstall or upgrade to systemd 257.7-1 either. Root cause was a failing systemd-sysusers call from the postinstall scriptlet.
So I checked sysusers config and found a group <> gshadow inconsistency with grpck.
After fixing it manually, no grpck errors, a reinstall of systemd still failed !
It turned out that systemd-sysusers reported to install some missing users and groups, but actually didn’t, so the following systemd-tmpfiles run failed in sequence of the scriptlet.

I havn’t figured out why systemd-sysusers (from 257.3-7) couldn’t add the required/essential users to a known good passwd, group, and gshadow (acccording to grpck, my best knowledge, file persissions as expected, etc). But after modifying the files according to the reported sysuser actions (adding user/group gnome-remote-desktop and more), systemd reinstalled smoothly, I could rebuild the kernel and my system booted again.

Is anybody facing similar problem? Or is everyting related to something very specific in my passwd/group/gshadow, and I further need to debug ?

Regards,
Toby

2

Please report this as a bug with your analysis please here How to file a bug :: Fedora Docs so that it reaches the attention of a maintainer.

3

I had 257.3-7 version on a fresh 42 install, first upgrade made it 257.6-1.
Could be related to system-upgrade hiccup.

4

The system-upgrade keeps the full journal logs of the upgrade.
You can see that log with

$ sudo dnf system-upgrade log
The following boots appear to contain offline transaction logs:
1 / e9801a1c72cf479783b0778ed88019d2: 2024-11-04 13:30:05 40→41
2 / b19b4c090e944f8b817fa018777dc234: 2025-04-19 11:19:49 41→42

Then using the number of the log you are interested in:

$ sudo dnf system-upgrade log --number=2
Apr 19 12:19:36 worthy.internal kernel: Linux version 6.13.9-200.fc41.x86_64 (mockbuild@12aa15bf8d4d46e4a8c329bf4b62f269) (gcc (GCC) 14.2.1 20250110 (Red Hat 14.2.1-7), GNU ld version 2.43.1-5.fc41) #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Mar 29 01:29:31 UTC 2025
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