Troubling Error (clr-boot-manager cannot update)

hdansin

My system has been pretty stable, but I've noticed some weird issues that I'm not sure are related, or if I'm just paranoid. One was Firefox showing a blank screen unless I disabled hardware acceleration, and a few system freezes when trying to install/play the Sims 3 (but that game is pretty janky no matter what it runs on). But what has me a little worried is the error message I received when I ran the check broken command:

 [✗] Updating clr-boot-manager                                           failed

A copy of the command output follows:

[FATAL] cbm (../src/bootman/bootman.c:L562): FATAL: Cannot mount boot device /dev/nvme0n1p1 on /boot: No such device

uname -r says that I am on the current kernel, but check-broken wants to reinstall it, and says it cannot access my boot device (which is also where the root filesystem is). Is my hard drive starting to go? Should I be worried?

Thanks for your time.

brent

hardware is always possible but s.m.a.r.t. tests only say adequate or near death so I've never known how to read them.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/755228/mountmounting-dev-sda1-on-boot-efi-failed-no-such-device
someone 11 months ago had an error like this in his/her Deb build...I thought this was one of those fluke oddities.
the person trying to help said: "I also note the message mount: mounting /run at /root/run failed: No such file or directory. At that point, the initramfs script is trying to mount the /run tmpfs filesystem to /root/run i.e. what will be the real /run once the script switches away from initramfs to the real root filesystem. Maybe your root filesystem does not include an empty /run directory that would act as a mount point for the RAM-based tmpfs filesystem?"

the OP replied a while later: "after added an empty /run，The mount: mounting /run at /root/run failed: No such file or directory problem has been resolved. –
just a student
Commented Aug 30, 2023 at 3:42 "

don't know if solus is set up that way.
and to be honest out of a handful of articles I'm not seeing hardware as much as one-off oddities like that ^^ one.
I am naturally digitally-paranoid as most people should be, but I don't see any bad guys if that's what you are thinking.
LOTS of glitchy firefox forum posts lately so that's probably not connected....

...must also know that eopkg check anything is going to throw some "broken" packages that are not broken. has to do with symlinks. crew working on it asfaik.

Axios

That error was in another thread so in my mind its not failing drives.
But it doesnt hurt to check that to cross it off list.
https://discuss.getsol.us/d/10769-major-difficulties-recovering-system-after-week-27-and-28-updates/3
That thread is up in the air for a fix at the moment seems like.
(Just info)

hdansin

@brent @Axios

Thank you both. At this point I don't think it's hardware. I saw on the mesa gitlab that there are some errors related to VAAPI and Firefox, and possibly vulkan. I don't have the experience or time to figure out whether these are relevant to my system, but hopefully a mesa update will fix it. I tried to play some of my installed games last night and a lot of them crashed, so I'm pretty sure it's mesa/driver stuff.

sudo clr-boot-manager update gives me this:

[ERROR] cbm (../src/lib/bootvar.c:L372): efi_set_variable() failed: No space left on device
[ERROR] cbm (../src/bootloaders/shim-systemd.c:L365): Cannot create EFI variable (boot entry)
[ERROR] cbm (../src/bootloaders/shim-systemd.c:L366): Please manually update your bios to add a boot entry for Solus

I've had that error before on a dual boot setup, but I'm confused because I just let the installer do it's thing on this system, and presumably it should have all the space it needs.

TraceyC

Please check the issue tracker to see if there's been a bug reported about this. If not, please create one so we can look into it. Thanks.

hdansin

Well I think my issue with firefox was local, since I tried it on another user profile and hardware acceleration worked fine. So I did a refersh Menu > Help > More Troubleshooting Information > Refresh Firefox, and everything is back to normal on my main user with hardware acceleration on. I also played some games last night and all went well.

Still have no idea about the clr-boot-manager error.

lf-araujo

hdansin the clr-boot error is simply too many kernels installed. Remove an old one and update again.

snowee

lf-araujo May we know whats the command to remove the old kernels that were installed in all our previous syncs?

other than old kernels, what other cruft can we safely remove from our Solus machines on a regular basis?

Thank you.

TraceyC

lf-araujo the clr-boot error is simply too many kernels installed. Remove an old one and update again.

I don't think this is correct. What is your reasoning for this?

I just updated my system on unstable and had issues so I checked for broken packages. During the attempt to reinstall broken packages, I saw the same error as in the OP. I have plenty of free space in /boot.

This is why I had asked for an issue to be created so the developers could look into the issue.
I've opened one: https://github.com/getsolus/packages/issues/3742

If anyone has this error, please respond in that bug report. Thanks.

lf-araujo

snowee clr-boot-manager --help

It is also good to clear the cache periodically, software manager does that. But you can do this on the command line too.

lf-araujo

TraceyC Yes, you were right. I got affected by this too, removing old kernels did not solve the issue (using clr-boot). But after I removed the linux-current package and rebooted on lts the error disappeared. Not sure if this can help your cases. The audio issue I was facing on lts is gone and all graphical stuff I need running on the discrete GPU is also being rendered properly. Good luck.