Subject: Re: bug#35875: Guix won't boot after installation with fully encrypted disk

From: Giovanni Biscuolo <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 May 2019 10:37:16 +0200

Hello Reg,

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

[...]

>> On boot, I am being prompted for the encryption key. So far so
>> good. The Grub menu is then displayed and disappears after a few
>> seconds – as it should – after which the computer is stuck on the
>> Grub
>
> Weird.

The strange behaviour here is that you reported it does not happen if
only the home partition is encrypted: if this is true this could not be
a GPU issue.

I'm going to test a full encrypted root install on bare metal and will
report back on this

> Does your compute have an AMD graphics card that could lead the kernel
> (KMS) to wreck havoc during initialization?

AFAIU ThinkPad T430 could come with an additional "NVIDIA NVS 5400M" GPU
[1] that is very Linux _unfriendly_; you can check this by booting
your machine as detailed below and doing a "lspci -nnn | grep VGA"

Anyway, to check if GPU is the problem here could you please add
"modprobe.blacklist=radeon" [2] (or vga=791 if this does not work [3])
to the "linux" kernel arguments and report back the error messages, if
any?

To add that kernel argument, you have to enter edit mode in Grub by
pressing "e" before the timeout (or press ESC to stop the timeout) and
edit the "linux" Grub line

If blacklisting radeon module works for you, you should add it to your
(operating-system ...) definition to make it permanent, something like:

  (kernel-arguments '("modprobe.blacklist=radeon"))

HTH! Gio'.

[...]

[1] http://www.lapspecs.com/detail/lenovo+thinkpad+t430
    http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Debian_Nvidia_Drivers_on_the_T530

[2] Grub configuration in the installarion ISO have that parameter

[3] should not be the case since the installer worked for you without
that kernel argument

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures