Linux Kernel 4.6.1 Released; Some Users Report Boot Issue

Marius Nestor, reporting for Softpedia (condensed): Linux kernel 4.6.1 is already here, only two weeks after the official launch of the Linux 4.6 kernel series. For those not in the loop, Linux 4.6 branch is the latest and most advanced kernel branch available right now for GNU/Linux operating systems, but it looks like its adoption is a little slow at the moment. "I'm announcing the release of the 4.6.1 kernel. All users of the 4.6 kernel series must upgrade," says Greg Kroah-Hartman. "The updated 4.6.y git tree can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser."
Some users are apparently facing boot failure issue on the latest version. An anonymous tipster tells Slashdot: Several folks on the web have reported a regression in the latest Linux kernels, starting with 4.6.1 and including the 4.7 beta that prevents booting and drops to busybox, at least the one supplied by the Ubuntu PPA. The boot sequence ends with "address family not supported by protocol: error getting socket" and then, "error initializing udev control socket" (screenshot here).

Comments

Could systemd be responsible for the boot issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was just a few days ago that I saw an article here Slashdot about how systemd changes are breaking software like screen and tmux.

Could systemd also be responsible for these booting problems described in the summary?

I know I experienced problems booting my Debian computers after upgrading to systemd. I've seen a lot of bug reports from other people describing similar problems involving systemd, too.

Re:Could systemd be responsible for the boot issue

[jandrese]

Looks to me like a problem with rSCSI or nfs or something is horking the boot process when it tries to mount root.

I'm not surprised. I had to struggle like crazy to get nfsroot working on Ubuntu 14 (diving deep into support forums to find the one completely undocumented option required to make it work). I would have given up except that Ubuntu has (had?) a trial thing that did nfsroot so I knew there had to be a way to make it work.

It's kind of dumb just how hard it is to make an old style thinclient these days. In the old days you would add the nfsroot option in DHCP and a tftp link for the kernel. Super easy. Now you need to jump through several hoops to even get to the point where you need a completely magical kernel commandline option to make it work. Even when you do systemd gets really upset with you because it really really wants to check UUIDs on everything and that doesn't make sense on a thin client. While it's possible to hack out the UUID checks, they get added back in with every minor kernel update (so every couple of days on Ubuntu) and require hacking several files to properly disable. Even then you get a 30 second wait because some message wasn't sent through the message queue (debugging mass message queues sucks) during boot and you have to rely on the fallback to finish booting.