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
A dnf upgrade to 7.1.8 installed the kernel rpm cleanly, then ran /boot out
of space. dracut wrote no initramfs, and because kernel-install stops at the
first failing plugin, 95-c630-devicetree never ran either — leaving a boot
entry with neither an initrd nor a devicetree line, which on this machine can
never boot. dnf reported success and nothing retried.
A kernel costs ~336 MiB here: a 210 MiB hostonly=no initramfs, a 98 MiB
dtb-<kver> directory carrying every board's device tree, plus vmlinuz and
System.map. Three of those cannot fit 1 GiB, so /boot goes to 2 GiB and
installonly_limit drops to 2.
Also fixes the quieter half of the same trap. snd-soc-wsa881x lives outside
the kernel package, so the speakers go silent after any kernel update with
nothing in the logs to explain it. c630-wsa881x rebuilds it and
96-c630-wsa881x.install calls it on each kernel-install add — always exiting
0, since a plugin failure is precisely what caused the damage above.
grub.cfg gains the next_entry one-shot block that has been carried by hand all
along, so testing a kernel costs a power cycle rather than a rescue.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011XgGF5wfxLDAybVnNz6eNQ
The account the image creates was fedora/fedora; make it grenade/grenade and
say in both docs that config/device.env decides it. Nothing else referenced the
name — sudo comes from wheel membership, not a per-user sudoers file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011XgGF5wfxLDAybVnNz6eNQ
It boots from the internal drive with the stick removed — 18s to multi-user,
no failed units.
The first thing tried on it was `dnf install net-tools`, which failed with:
Transaction failed: Rpm transaction failed.
- systemd is needed by net-tools-2.0-0.77.20160912git.fc44.aarch64
systemd is obviously installed; the machine had just booted. The cause is the
clock. This machine's RTC cannot be set at all — ioctl(RTC_SET_TIME) returns
"No such device" — and reads 1970 every boot, so systemd advances it to its own
build date. That is close enough to look plausible and early enough that rpm
treats package signatures created after it as not yet valid, skips those
headers outright, and reports the packages as absent:
Signature created at Sat Jul 25 18:33:30 2026 invalid: signature is not alive
error: rpmdbNextIterator: skipping h# 282
package systemd is not installed
chrony was already added to base.pkgs for the drift; it turns out to be load
bearing rather than a nicety, and it syncs within about five seconds of the
network appearing. Documented, because the symptom points nowhere near the
cause.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XWRjNJMistCy6ngXH5aJLS
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
I had this wrong. The claim that accelerated graphics works on the firmware
Fedora ships does not survive contact with the device tree.
Fedora does package an sdm845/a630_zap.mbn, which is what led me astray, but
that is the generic Snapdragon 845 zap shader. The C630's node in
sdm850-lenovo-yoga-c630.dts names qcom/sdm850/LENOVO/81JL/qcdxkmsuc850.mbn
specifically — model-signed, present only in the machine's Windows partition.
Until it is supplied the display is unaccelerated.
Also add qcslpi850.mbn and qcvss850.mbn, which were missing entirely, and
attribute the sensor hub to slpi_pas rather than cdsp_pas. The list is now
every firmware-name property in the mainline device tree rather than a
recollection of forum posts, so it should be complete: eight files, not five.
WiFi and Bluetooth are unaffected — ath10k WCN3990 including wlanmdsp.mbn is
genuinely redistributable and genuinely shipped.
Add a section on locating the blobs on an old backup, for the case where
Windows is long gone from the machine.
Only comments changed in config/packages/base.pkgs, so the package set hashes
identically and the staged base stays valid.
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
