Error on boot followed by frozen rEFInd. `EFI stub: ERROR: exit_boot() failed`... `Buffer Too Small refurned from vlminuz-5.12.2`

[Eric Ihli]

Here is a photo of the error that flashes for a tiny fraction of a second before I get kicked back to a completely frozen rEFInd screen.

Searching the web for "buffer too small" "efi stub" "exit_boot" "failed" doesn't reveal much to me.

My load options from a slightly customized refind_linux.conf are `"Boot with standard options" "crypt_root=UUID=e5088221-bee0-4bfa-95ac-613e416a9254 rw quiet root=UUID=4321806b-4196-410c-9a8f-ba732518102f"

I have a practically identical Manjaro kernel/initrd image that I followed similar steps with and it works fine.

The particular image that I'm having this issue with is a Gentoo image. When Gentoo was installed from the live USB, I chose the encryption option. The install gave me a grub.efi that rEFInd found and could boot into. I am trying to get rid of using GRUB as the middle-man, so while booted into Manjaro I decrypted the partition that had the Gentoo install then used chroot and genkernel to create a new kernel/initramfs (with --luks for the decryption modules) and I copied those images to an unencrypted partition that rEFInd auto-scans.

Thanks ahead of time for any thoughts that could help me solve this.

[Eric Ihli]

Oh, something that might help me troubleshoot this would be if I could find a way to keep rEFInd logs around after the failed boot attempt. Since rEFInd freezes, I have to hold down the power button to re-power the machine. When it boots up again and I boot into a working system, the log file only contains info from the most recent boot. I lose all the info from the boot that caused the freeze. I see the option to set log_level but I haven't found an option to do log rotation. I just had the idea to skip rEFInd, use BIOS to select a USB device, then check the log file there. I'll try that when I have time and report back.

[Eric Ihli]

Here is the log from a failed boot. As far as I can tell, rEFInd finishes its work. So I'm going to assume this has something to do with how I'm creating the kernel image and initrd. I'll move this discussion to a forum related to linux rather than rEFInd-specific but will post one more update here if/when I have a resolution.

==========Launching 'Boot EFI\Pentoo\vmlinuz-5.12.2-pentoo-x86_64 from BOOT '==========
22:13:31 - Getting EFI variable 'PreviousBoot' from disk
22:13:31 - Loading file 'PreviousBoot'
22:13:31 - Saving EFI variable 'PreviousBoot' to disk
22:13:31 - Freeing OldBuf
22:13:31 - Starting vmlinuz-5.12.2-pentoo-x86_64
22:13:31 - Using load options 'crypt_root=UUID=e5088221-bee0-4bfa-95ac-613e416a9254 rw quiet root=UUID=4321806b-4196-410c-9a8f-ba732518102f initrd=EFI\Pentoo\initramfs-5.12.2-pentoo-x86_64.img'
22:13:31 - '\EFI\Pentoo\vmlinuz-5.12.2-pentoo-x86_64' is a valid loader
22:13:31 - Getting EFI variable 'SecureBoot' from NVRAM
22:13:31 - Launching 'vmlinuz-5.12.2-pentoo-x86_64'

[Eric Ihli]

This was not related to rEFInd.

Rebuilt kernel and initrd with genkernel --clean --install --mountboot --microcode --keymap --lvm --kernel-config=/proc/config.gz --luks --gpg all. (I think some of those arguments weren't necessary) Then boot params crypt_root=UUID=<uuid> rw quiet root=UUID=<uuid> and all is well.