elilo boot issue after current update to 5.19.0
 

Currently not able to boot slackware64-current after 5.19.0 kernel upgrade.
- any chance it is an elilo size issue again?

- When I revert to kernel 5.18.15 - everything works)

Is anyone else seeing this ?

So it does seem to boot with Grub2 just not elilo.

I recover using boot-usb that I have setup with grub2 and autodiscover ...


Setup with problems:
UEFI
elilo - slackware64-current
my vmlinuz is a copy of generic-vmlinuz


cat /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.conf


after I upgrade the kernel I usually run this:

Yes, you are not alone. I was bitten 2 times too. And there are another people who bitten the dust.

I for one, I switched to Grub2 fully and I given to ELILO a long goodbye - life is too great to waste it playing with things abandoned 8 (eight) years ago.

Same here, I only tried to upgrade one machine so far, an HP Z440 with an E5 v3 Xeon, but I have the issue. I assumed I forgot to add a driver to my ramdisk or something like that because I forget that somewhat often.

But after messing with it for a bit, I finally tried a USB boot stick based off the new kernel (I had had one based on the old one on hand and was using that to mess with my system via chroot). That one works, so I started suspecting it might just be elilo and came here to confirm. So looks like that must be the issue!

Now to decide if I want GRUB or rEFInd... hmmm...

I dont use the slackware kernels, but I got no problems booting a custom 5.19.0 kernel using elilo here, on a slackware64 15.0 system. No idea what the difference could be thats causing issues. Incase it helps, I dont use initrd, (although my initrd line points to an intel microcode bundle).

I have the same problem, unable to boot 5.19 kernel. I use refind with elilo. I don't use initrd.

Yes I do the same and it didn't work for me as well.
When I have time and patience I will see if it can work with rEFInd alone without any chainload, or with rEFInd + grub

I have dual booting with windows I fix it. It's seems the problem is in ELILO, so I did:

1. mount the EFI partition with: mountvol Z: /S
2. Enter the EFI partition and going to refind directory
3. Copy the refind.conf to my drive and open in with notepad++
4. Remove the ELILO boot and add my own in the end of config like:
5. Save the file and copy him back to EFI partition (overwrite the original)
6. Reboot and Boot was success.
7. Enter as root and do: removepkg elilo

I hope this will help some one.

Hi,

I ran into the same issue with kernel v5.19.0 using elilo on sw15-cur. For me, it looked like the elilo.efi loader failed to find something useful when reading the contents of the efi partition and then just kept trying.

But I like the efi stub option in the kernel, since you don't need another bootloader at all... It causes the kernel to basically become an efi-executable binary itself, so you can immediately load it without using elilo/grub/whatever, just by adding the appropriate option via efibootmgr.

Something like the following worked for me (with sda1=efi, sda2=swap, sda3=ext4):

efibootmgr -d /dev/sda -p 1 -c -L "EFI Stub" -l "EFI/Slackware/vmlinuz" -u "root=/dev/sda3 resume=/dev/sda2 rw initrd=EFI/Slackware/initrd.gz" -v

So I'll be removing elilo.conf and elilo.efi from /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware, just leaving vmlinuz + initrd.gz there.

I updated my home workstation, an hp z840 with dual e5 v3s, and that one worked perfectly fine. It's running root on ZFS even. That one was already using rEFInd though.

No idea what the issue is with elilo, I'm surprised to hear that it works just fine for some people. Curious what the issues is. Graphics/modesetting drivers maybe? I have to admit I barked up the wrong tree with that for a minute thinking it was a driver issue because it seemed like it was just outputting to the incorrect console or something. I'm running AMD gpus all the way around, WX 3200 in the machine here that I observed the issue on.

To get back into this machine, I just used the GRUB command line from the boot USB stick:

These settings will vary on your machine of course, for me my EFI partition is on the first partition of my /dev/sdd drive. You also may or may not have an initrd, I build mine custom every time I update the kernel.

This looks really interesting, I've used grub2 and refined(when winblows dual was needed, or because I do like refined) but never before the EFI Stub. I'm going to give this a try :)


--update this works well thanks, as does adding the stub to refined. Might stick with the one Mr.Gadgets suggested for the time being. Seems like less is more. :)

first time i've hard bricked failed to boot in years, but 5.19 and elilo just isn't working....

looks like grubby time

There's also an option to append a "bootconfig" file to the end of the initrd/initramfs to specify kernel options, so you don't have to put them in the EFI entries directly. From 5.19 onwards it can even be imbedded directly in the kernel at compile time rather than the initrd.

See bootconfig.rst in the Documentation/admin-guide/ directory of the kernel source for details. I haven't tried this one yet, but it looks interesting.

If there is a problem with the EFI STUB at present then it's possible it could also upset some EFI firmwares as well as ELILO and rEFInd — which some folks have already reported having issues with in this forum — so I guess it's all a matter of suck it and see for the time being.

One thing I'm not clear on is whether one should append the bootconfig to the initrd before or after one prepends the early-fw file for the cpu microcode. The docs talk about alignment, so I'm guessing that doing it first is probably the way.

There's some speculation that this could be an efi stub bug in 5.19, too. I'm hanging out on 5.18.15, just to see what happens before I switch boot loaders. I'm not opposed, but elilo is the default, and if the default isn't working, people will need to potentially test a fix.

Any chance you have a mirror that still has the last 5.18 kernel?