this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Maybe rebuilding the ramdisk failed during the original upgrade?
One of the post-install stages after upgrading the kernel is rebuilding the initramfs - a tiny environment for bootstrapping the main OS.
If you trigger it manually with
mkinitcpio --allpresets
you'll notice it has fancy colorful output, with clearly visible warnings/errors.However when invoked as part of an upgrade this coloring is removed, making errors difficult to spot.
I had this stage randomly fail a few times, resulting in an unbootable system like you described - solution was to just trigger a manual rebuild or reinstall the kernel with pacman -U.
It's possible that this is what actually fixed things when you downgraded the kernel.