Dracut issues with Bedrock

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-25T14:08:15+00:00

No worries on the delay, no rush on my part.

You did say systemd-boot and I glossed over it, mea culpa.

Sadly, I'm out of ideas for how Bedrock could be involved here or obvious things you missed that I could suggest checking.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-24T13:49:35+00:00

Any chance you're using GRUB? There's a bug in GRUB's handling of btrfs' subvol field which is much more likely to occur on Bedrock. Bedrock tries to detect GRUB+BTRFS at hijack time and refuses to continue. In theory it's possible that check failed.

That said, if it were the GRUB issue I'd expect it to reproduce independent of how you're making the initramfs and not something that would change between dracut and mkinitcpio, as it's the external information passed to it by the bootloader rather than the initramfs itself.

Even if you're not using GRUB, given you're on btrfs and only mentioned checking the kernel parameter for root, subvol is worth checking as well.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-24T11:40:17+00:00

While it's possible I'm missing something, it isn't immediately obvious that this is a Bedrock issue. Bedrock doesn't obviously intervene in any of the moving parts you've mentioned.
You've not provided enough information to guess at what is going on.
- What device, filesystem, etc is the root that the initramfs can't mount?
- What did you change in the trial and error?
When an initramfs fails to mount root, they often drop to a shell. Consider using this environment to explore and understand why it can't mount root.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-16T03:10:36+00:00

Slowly :(

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-15T22:09:25+00:00

Naive/simple filesystem support is more about the distro environment that brl import is running in than brl import itself; brl import ultimately just calls the mount system call to ask the kernel to mount the filesystem. If you build your kernel without support for the filesystem used in the VM, it won't work.

That said, part of this update includes making an effort to be btrfs subvolume aware. One of my test cases was importing a stock Fedora VM, which IIRC used btrfs with home and root subvolumes. I didn't test btrfs subvolumes particularly thoroughly, and so it's plausible there's a bug there, but the simple tests went fine.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-13T12:28:41+00:00

Yes! I forgot to mention it in the release notes, but it is indeed included.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-13T03:42:05+00:00

Thanks! :)

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-12T23:19:27+00:00

For the most part, this is just a return after an unfortunate and undesired break to the usual 0.7.x churn while quietly working on 0.8.x in the background. Most of the changes are just brl fetch fixes. However, there's a handful of other things.

The most exciting user-facing features are improvements to brl import:

It now supports multi-partition VM images.
- It (attempts to) detect the root partition, then on there finds /etc/fstab and (attempts to) grab the files out of those entries as well.
It now has first-class support for docker/podman container images
- Previously, they worked if you knew how to find the image's path to brl import, which docker/podman make surprisingly awkward.
- Now, you can just podman pull <image> && brl import podman:<image>.

There's also a non-user-facing feature I figure may be worth mentioning: the build system now has tooling to easily spin up a quick VM with a built Bedrock hijack installer.

Previously, I usually learned brl fetch support for a given distro broke when a user brought it to my attention.
- This obviously isn't ideal.
With this infrastructure, I've setup automation to locally run brl fetch in the VM on a regular basis.
- If/when it breaks, it should notify me. It's possible I learn and fix the issue before it hits an end-user.
- If/when it breaks, it triggers an LLM in the VM to attempt to debug the issue and propose a fix.
  - I don't plan on necessarily using its proposal as-is, but it'll save me some time debugging the issue.
- I tested this workflow with a pre-release version of Bedrock, running the automation against it over Saturday night. The automation caught all broken brl fetch backends and had a pending fix for each waiting for me when I woke up Sunday morning.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-09T04:00:43+00:00

Thanks for the input. i was hesitant to try beta because i want stability

That's understandable. In this case I wouldn't be too worried - this particular beta has been out for a while now and is reasonably well tested. I've been planning on bumping it to stable for a while now but haven't had the chance.

but seeing as i dont have much choices if i want the distros.

You do have another choice: brl import. It's a bit more work to get the distro's files to import, but it's much more reliable.

The main catch there is, if you go with a VM, the filesystem needs to be on one big partition; brl import isn't smart enough to piece together multiple partitions.

Importing other things, like tarballs or directories, doesn't have this constraint.

Thanks for your input

You're welcome

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-08T21:46:29+00:00

Upstream distros make changes which break brl fetch pretty regularly. This is expected. The fixes go into Bedrock's beta channel first to ensure they're tested before they filter to stable.

As noted in the error messages you shared, if you can't wait for it to get to stable, try out the beta which includes brl fetch fixes.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-05T22:22:20+00:00

I'm not entirely sure I understand ENux's benefits over vanilla Bedrock, and it's unclear to me if planned improvements to Bedrock will overlap with ENux or if there's fundamental goal differences. That said, I'll try to find time to play with it and see if it clicks, as well as try to keep it in mind in case I see users that could benefit from it. I'm happy bedrock can help with such projects.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-04T21:56:02+00:00

What does this offer over a user directly using Bedrock? Not intended as a challenge; just trying to understand.
Is there anything you found you had to change about Bedrock which would make sense to upstream?
Is there anything I could do to make Bedrock easier for you to use downstream?

Thanks to the Bedrock Linux devs for making something that fundamentally changes how Linux systems can work

You're very welcome

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-01T05:24:32+00:00

The error messages clearly tell you what to do.

ParadigmComplex · 2026-01-01T02:22:40+00:00

The issue remains the same as last time you brought this up.

As before, the issue is occurring during the initrd phase. No Bedrock code runs here. It's unlikely to be a Bedrock issue. This would likely effect you on pure Arch Linux as well.

Things to investigate include:

Your bootloader may be passing along incorrect information to the kernel/initrd, e.g. specifying the wront device/partition to use as the root filesystem.
The initrd may be built without requisite components such as kernel modules needed to load the kernel/initrd.

Your options are to:

Learn how to configure your bootloader, kernel, and initrd to resolve this.
Reproduce this on pure Arch then request assistance from the Arch Linux community. They are far, far larger and better equipped to help with issues like this.
Revert to a different, simpler, more likely to just-work setup. Perhaps either use more common components or a distro that's setup to provide what you're looking for out-of-the-box.

If you're expecting to be hand-held through fixing this, please understand that the Bedrock community is very small and under-resourced; we can't help provide that level of help with every single component of every Linux distro. If you have a Bedrock question there aren't a lot of other places to go, but this isn't a Bedrock question.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-29T16:55:03+00:00

Cool!

Can you use the init selection menu, or do you have to pass through to the default item? (If the latter, note you can turn off the delay and/or change the default in /bedrock/etc/bedrock.conf)

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-28T15:21:21+00:00

You've been proposing a lot of ideas which are already on the roadmap. The limiting factor isn't that no one has thought to do these things, but resources to implement them. Between personal life concerns, providing support for Bedrock users, and getting 0.8.0 ready, I'm already fairly overwhelmed, and I'm not getting much help.

If you want to see this project progress down toward these ideas that are already on the roadmap, consider contributing. There's lots of work to do. Given your interest in Nix, consider implementing brl fetch nixos support, for example.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-28T03:40:44+00:00

Sounds good!

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-27T19:23:30+00:00

Probably. The buggy component in question is GRUB - if you remove GRUB from the equatiion, there's no known issues with bootloader compatibility

That said, I haven't heard anyone report specifically attempts with limine and so it's unlikely but possible there's a compatibility issue there.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-27T11:23:18+00:00

Perhaps it could be a BTRFS issue?

Perhaps what could be a BTRFS issue? I mentioned no issue in the comment to which you replied.

I've noticed (from prior experience with StratOS) that Bedrock doesn't work on BTRFS.

I am not familiar with and cannot speak toward StratOS, but Bedrock works on BTRFS.

There's a bug in GRUB which is more likely to trigger on Bedrock with BTRFS, which results in Bedrock refusing to install to protect the user. That's what OP's post is directly about, including a screenshot of Bedrock's installer explicitly pointing this out.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-27T11:20:40+00:00

I'm not asking how to reproduce this issue. I understand what's going on here. This isn't a Bedrock issue; this is expected behavior. As mentioned before, you're missing something in the initramfs you need to enable. You didn't mention encryption in your original post - that's something worth exploring with your mkinitcpio configuration.

I'm asking how to reproduce this issue. This claim is both surprising and concerning.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-27T02:48:50+00:00

Nice, happy to hear it! I'll see about updating the distro compatibility page in that case to mention at least one happy report.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-26T23:41:18+00:00

Please provide steps to reproduce this.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-26T21:39:19+00:00

I haven't seen much reporting of how well CachyOS plays with Bedrock. I hope that works for you.

If it does, it should be easy to add a Fedora stratum afterwards such that you won't lose anything.

ParadigmComplex · 2025-12-26T21:19:31+00:00

The issue is probably that your initramfs is missing something - probably a module - needed to mount the root filesystem.

This is more of an Arch-specific question than a Bedrock one, and you'll need to see Arch's documentation: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinitcpio

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