🐛 Alpine standard ISO does not boot on metal

[Trogie]

Hello, I was trying to boot up the Alpine standard iso on metal (Lenovo Thinkcentre) but problem while 'waiting for cdrom' and afterwards from one retry to another, never ending in the QR

The same image on Virtualbox boots without any problem.

[mauromorales]

@Trogie thanks for testing this out and opening an issue!

[mauromorales]

@Trogie which Kairos version are you using? If possible, could you share the contents of your /etc/os-release (the one from the VM is ok) and is it safe to assume that the ThinkCenter is an amd64

[Itxaka]

@Trogie currently the initrd script tries to wait for the cdrom at /dev/sr0

If your hardware has a different configuration the cdrom could appear as a different device instead plus depending on the hardware used it could even need a different kernel modules which is not currently in there.

That its why it gets stuck in there forever, probably the cdrom is a different device and it cant find it where we look at it.

[Itxaka]

Weird because we load the generic cdrom drivers that should work for most of the cdroms out there

@Trogie I think that failure will drop you in an emergency shell right? (otherwise you can add rd.break=pre-livecd to the cmdline to drop into one)

Maybe once you are in there you can run lsmod to show the modules inserted and dmesg and paste that info in the ticket to see if we can identify why is not loading the cdrom at /dev/sr0 ?

[Trogie]

@Trogie which Kairos version are you using? If possible, could you share the contents of your /etc/os-release (the one from the VM is ok) and is it safe to assume that the ThinkCenter is an amd64

Latest version: alpine 3.19 amd64 generic v3.0.4 with k3s 1.29.3

[Trogie]

Weird because we load the generic cdrom drivers that should work for most of the cdroms out there

@Trogie I think that failure will drop you in an emergency shell right? (otherwise you can add rd.break=pre-livecd to the cmdline to drop into one)

Maybe once you are in there you can run lsmod to show the modules inserted and dmesg and paste that info in the ticket to see if we can identify why is not loading the cdrom at /dev/sr0 ?

Yes probably another device.
OK I will try that bootoption but for now my 3 thinkcentres are already running Kairos Debian. I'll boot the Alpine iso again tonight when I finished testing some things.
Still have a little preference for Alpine... :D

[ci-robbot]

<@Trogie> Hello! I am a bot, an experiment of @mudler and @jimmykarily. Thanks for reporting the issue with the Alpine standard ISO not booting on your Lenovo Thinkcentre. To help us investigate the issue further, could you please provide the following information in your next reply?:

1. The specific versions of the Kairos and Alpine you're using.
2. The output of dmesg and lsmod if you can access the emergency shell by adding rd.break=pre-livecd to the command line or when the system fails to boot.
3. Also, could you provide the exact command you used to boot with the additional boot option?

If you have already provided this information, kindly disregard this message.

Please remember that I am just a bot and am not able to resolve the issue directly. The Github account with admin rights to the repository will need to take the necessary actions based on the information you provide. Thanks!

[Trogie]

ok, I was finally able to reboot the 'now Kairos p2p nodes' with the latest alpine ISO.
With the pre-livecd break added in grub, I got into the emergency shell: lsmod and dmesg output in attachment. Indeed no cdrom device...

dmesg.txt
lsmod.txt

[Itxaka]

ok, I was finally able to reboot the 'now Kairos p2p nodes' with the latest alpine ISO. With the pre-livecd break added in grub, I got into the emergency shell: lsmod and dmesg output in attachment. Indeed no cdrom device...

dmesg.txt lsmod.txt

Thanks @Trogie ! Are you booting from an usb device instead of a traditional cdrom? If that is the case, thats currently not supported unfortunately, I need to go over and add support for that in the initramfs script, as its currently hardcoded to load the cdrom :(

Im not even sure how to do it correctly, I guess by checking for /dev/disk/by-label maybe I can just identify the install media directly instead of relaying in the cdrom device being there directly.

I'll have a quick look at this to see if its possible.

[Itxaka]

Fix for this is now on master!

@Trogie if you build an alpine iso from the master branch of use the v3.0.6 artifacts(https://github.com/kairos-io/kairos/releases/tag/v3.0.6) hopefully this should be solved now!

[Trogie]

Hallo @Itxaka, I tried the v3.0.6 and v3.0.7 alpine standard iso but unfortunately still the same problem with cdrom mount... Strangely I do not see the patch commit kairos-io/packages@64179f3 in the release? I try to build the iso on my localhost but still not demystified the procedure for my braincells :D

[Itxaka]

@Trogie will test this, maybe I screwed the versioning and its only on master :o

[Itxaka]

oh yeah, its not on any release only on master :(

If you clone the repo you can build it locally with earthly and the following:

earthly +iso \
      --VARIANT=core \
      --MODEL=generic \
      --FLAVOR=alpine \
      --FLAVOR_RELEASE=3.19 \
      --FAMILY=alpine \
      --BASE_IMAGE=alpine:3.19

You can change the VARIANT from core to standard if you want a k3s bundled iso. That will generate an iso under the build dir with the latest alpine build, which should have the fixed package!

Otherwise you should wait for kairos 3.1.x which should have this patch already in there!

[Trogie]

OK thanks, will help me a lot to build the iso. Thanks. Keep you updated! Probably on may 1st :p