Ubuntu
initramfs-tools package

  1. Bug #1667512
  2. Comment #10

Comment 10 for bug 1667512

Revision history for this message
B. Milde (bmilde) wrote : Re: update-initramfs hangs on upgrade, dpkg unusable, unbootable system

Thanks atom!

Indeed, we also had a stale nfs share and an automatic apt-get security update that left our ubuntu 16.04. server in an unclean state since it would silently hang on update-initramfs. Because the mounted nfs share remained unresponsive, update-initramfs was hanging for several days. Killing it and rerunning sudo dpkg --configure -a would result in a deadlock and no other apt-get was possible since dpkg couldn't finish its last operation. Calling update-initramfs manually would also hang and could only be stopped with kill -9 (ctrl+c did not work).

Commenting out the sync command in the generate_initramfs function of /usr/sbin/update-initramfs worked to restore the system to a rebootable state! However a soft shut down didn't work either (shutdown -r now) presumably because it tried to sync the stale nfs mount again.