Subject: system boot & modloop

From: Riccardo Mottola <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 12:44:50 +0200

Hi all,

I did a fresh install of 3.22 on a ThinkPad amd64. It was not clean, it 
had FreeBSD and Windows. I wanted to keep dual booting and replace FreeBSD.
I had installed Alpine previously on 32bit laptops without issues and 
kept it up-to-date.

Boot from the CD was problematic: it had consistent modloop issues, so 
that the booted system had no ethernet nor wifi.
I looked on the internet and hints were about that existing partitioned 
disk was an issue. I decided to use another Debian USB stick, format it 
and reboot with alpine. DId not help

At the end, the only fix was:
|modloop_verify=no

at boot and I could get into a working Alpine, as usual. I proceeded 
with settup, used whole disk for simplicity. Rebooted and started 
installing all classic stuff for X... nouveau worked, windowmanager, 
basic stuff all fine! Unpacked data backup in my home.

Poweroff & reboot next day, bad surprise: no ethernet, no framebuffer, 
no anything. Appears the system is completely without modules.
I see no modloop errors though. I see no errors at all, except during 
network setup where "no such devices" comes, for obvious reasons. Using 
||modloop_verify=no now doesn't help either, because it is not a modloop 
error.

Any hints what is going wrong and how can debug?

I tried checking "rc-service" and I see acpid is crashed, the rest is 
running.
A check says it is beause of /dev/input/event0 missing

I tried manually starting modloop with:

rc-service modloop

"modloop failed to start" but in messages find that no reason. Is this 
expected on  an installed system?

Riccardo
|||

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From: Konstantin Kulikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 16:20:16 +0300

You're likely booting old kernel while having /lib/modules only for newer
kernel. This can easily happen if you don't have /boot mounted RW before
running apk upgrade. No idea about CD issues.

---

From: Riccardo Mottola <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 16:50:38 +0200

Hi,

Konstantin Kulikov wrote:
> You're likely booting old kernel while having /lib/modules only for 
> newer kernel. This can easily happen if you don't have /boot mounted 
> RW before running apk upgrade. No idea about CD issues.

thanks for the hint, but it doesn't seem to apply

Kernel running is 6.12.41-0-lts and it is also the only kernel in /boot

ls /lib/modules shows a matching version and contains 124.5 MB of 
modules...

boot is mounted rw currently too.

Riccardo

---

From: Konstantin Kulikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 18:33:57 +0300

Do you have udev running (ps | grep udev)? If it's not running, but present
in runlevels (rc-update), then clear /var/cache/rc/* and /run/openrc/* and
reboot.

That's all the issues I've seen.

---

From: Riccardo Mottola <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 18:14:49 +0200

Hi,

Konstantin Kulikov wrote:
> Do you have udev running (ps | grep udev)? If it's not running, but 
> present in runlevels (rc-update), then clear /var/cache/rc/* and 
> /run/openrc/* and reboot.
>

udev was not running but in runlevels as cited here 
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Eudev (did run setup-devd yesterday).

clearning /var/cache/rc* was not enough, but /run/openrc/* did the trick!

thanks, let's hope it remains stable!

Riccardo

---

From: Konstantin Kulikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2025 20:17:12 +0300

Please file an issue on gitlab with the steps you did
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/
I use a manual install so I thought I broke it myself, but since there are
2 of us it means something is broken in openrc or alpine's distribution of
openrc.