Upgrade to 19.10 results in "Out of Memory" error on boot

[Terry Dawson]

This is probably a duplicate of 1842320.

On upgrading to 19.10 a boot fails with grub immediately reporting an "Out of Memory" error after prompting that it is loading the RAM disk. By default the system is unresponsive at this stage, hitting a key does nothing.

I tried the workaround described in 1842320 for this, explicitly setting GFXMODE in Grub to 640x480. This resulted in the system successfully responding to the "Hit any key" prompt, but still failing to boot. The boot failure is a blank screen, no icon, and no progress.

I can still boot the system with my pre-existing 4.4.0 kernel but both of:

Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-24-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.0.0-37-generic

fail to boot.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 19.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:19.10.15.4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-131.157-generic 4.4.134
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-131-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.2
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
Date: Sun Dec 29 11:09:44 2019
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-01-24 (1068 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160719)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to eoan on 2019-12-28 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeXorgFixuplog:
 INFO:root:/usr/bin/do-release-upgrade running
 INFO:root:No xorg.conf, exiting
mtime.conffile..etc.update-manager.release-upgrades: 2019-06-23T08:04:36.833372

[Terry Dawson (tjd-animats)]

Correction:

After explicitly setting GFXMODE to 640x480 it is only a boot into the 5.3.0 kernel that fails. A boot into the 5.0.0 or 4.4.0 kernels succeed.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Kai-Heng Feng (kaihengfeng)]

Please test latest mainline kernel:
https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v5.5-rc4