Simulating an upgrade — running kernel-core's %posttrans command by hand —
turned up two faults that had nothing to do with the full /boot, and would
have broken every future kernel install on their own.
95-c630-devicetree trusted $KERNEL_INSTALL_BOOT_ROOT. `kernel-install inspect`
reports "Layout: other, Boot Root: /boot/efi" here, because the ESP is all it
recognises, while Fedora's 20-grub.install writes BLS entries to
/boot/loader/entries regardless. So the hook looked for the device tree on the
ESP, did not find it, and skipped the patch — leaving an entry with no
devicetree line, which on this machine cannot boot. Paths in a BLS entry are
relative to the filesystem holding the entry, so the only correct boot root is
the one carrying both loader/entries and dtb-<kver>. Search for that instead.
dracut-config-rescue sets dracut_rescue_image=yes, so each install also built
a second ~210 MiB initramfs, which is what refilled /boot straight after it
was cleared. That image cannot boot this machine either: the rescue entry is
<machine-id>-0-rescue.conf, carrying no kernel version, so the devicetree hook
never matches it. Turned off.
Verified by rerunning the simulation: both kernels now have a devicetree line
and a present initrd, no rescue image is generated, snd-soc-wsa881x is rebuilt
automatically, and /boot holds at 72%.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011XgGF5wfxLDAybVnNz6eNQ
Rebuilding the initramfs on the machine rather than in the build container
pulled qcom_q6v5_pas into it. There it probes while the initramfs is still the
root filesystem, asks for qcadsp850.mbn, gets -2, and never retries — the same
race 10-c630.conf already documents for the Adreno firmware. The ADSP hosts
the whole audio path, so the machine comes up with no sound card and a sound
device deferring on "error getting cpu dai name", which points nowhere near
firmware. The blobs cannot go in the initramfs to fix it: they are ~20 MiB and
are extracted from Windows, so they need not exist at build time. Omitting the
driver instead means it loads once the real root is there. The modem driver
goes with it, since it is not needed early either.
Separately, the WCD9340 decides what is plugged in by measuring impedance, so
an amplifier on the headphone socket reads as an open circuit and the jack
control never leaves 'off'. PipeWire marks the port not available, will not
keep it as the default sink, and GNOME hides it — an output that works when
driven directly becomes unreachable from the desktop. Dropping JackControl
from the Headphones device leaves availability unknown rather than no, and the
port becomes permanently selectable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011XgGF5wfxLDAybVnNz6eNQ
Validated by running it on the machine, twice, and inspecting the result.
Two properties of this laptop rule out the obvious approach, and the script
exists mainly to encode them. Its internal UFS reports 4096-byte logical
sectors, so the image — built with 512-byte geometry — cannot be dd'd onto it;
the GPT header and every partition offset would land in the wrong place. And
there are no EFI runtime variables, so efibootmgr cannot register a boot entry
and GRUB has to sit at the removable-media path where the firmware looks
unprompted.
Three things the validation runs caught that review would not have:
rsync is not in the image. I had put it in the build container and never in
the package list, so the first run died at the copy. It now falls back to tar
(--xattrs-include='*', or SELinux labels are silently dropped and the result
does not boot), and rsync is in base.pkgs for the progress output.
Copying a live root makes tar exit non-zero — files change underneath it, and
this machine's clock is wrong besides, so every mtime looks like it is in the
future. With pipefail that aborted the install after the root filesystem and
before /boot, leaving a half-installed disk that looked plausible. Warning-level
exits are now tolerated and only a fatal exit 2 stops the run.
systemd-machine-id-setup keeps an existing valid id, and one had just been
copied off the stick, so the installed system was a clone. The file is removed
first now.
Also: msm_dpu probes ~6s in, while the initramfs is still root, and asks for
qcom/a630_sqe.fw before the real filesystem carrying it is reachable. It never
retries. Adding the Adreno firmware to the initramfs is a few tens of
kilobytes. c630-firmware does the same for the DSP blobs once they exist, since
dracut rejects install_items globs that match nothing.
chrony, because the RTC reads 1970 and nothing was correcting it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XWRjNJMistCy6ngXH5aJLS
Assembles a ready-to-write disk image via Gitea Actions. Mainline has carried
sdm850-lenovo-yoga-c630.dts since 5.5 and Fedora ships it in kernel-core, so
unlike aarch64-laptops/build there is no kernel or GRUB to compile — what is
left is producing an image that boots on firmware which hands Linux no device
tree.
The build runs in an aarch64 container under qemu-user and builds filesystems
from directory trees with mke2fs -d and mcopy rather than mounting loop
devices, so it works on runners that will not hand out /dev/loop-control.
A kernel-install hook writes the devicetree line into each BLS entry; without
it the first `dnf update kernel` would produce an unbootable system.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XWRjNJMistCy6ngXH5aJLS
