Systemd-boot is stuck on a black screen after update

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

The title is rather self-explanatory. I updated my system, and now systemd-boot isn’t even drawing to the screen. It doesn’t show the menu or anything, and if you launch it through Ventoy for instance, it just doesn’t even blank the screen, the machine hangs.

inxi -Fxza

I did what anyone who’s faced boot issues would do, and decided to chroot into my system. My ESP is at /dev/sda1, and my EnOS partition is at /dev/sda4, so I executed the following commands:

lsblk # to make sure
sudo mount /dev/sda4 -o subvol=@,noatime /mnt # yes i use btrfs
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/efi # on my real system i also use /efi
sudo arch-chroot /mnt

Then I tried these commands:

sudo reinstall-kernels
sudo pacman -Syu linux

To no avail. (obviously I’d reboot and try again)

What would be the cause of this issue, and how do I fix it?

2

do you by chance have apparmour installed?

3

pacman said that apparmor was an optional dependency for systemd but it didn’t say (installed) by it. So to answer your question, no.

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4 
core/systemd             258-1        258-2          0.00 MiB       9.22 MiB
core/systemd-libs        258-1        258-2          0.00 MiB       1.24 MiB
core/systemd-resolvconf  258-1        258-2          0.00 MiB       0.00 MiB
core/systemd-sysvcompat  258-1        258-2          0.00 MiB       0.01 MiB

running a sudo pacman -Syu from the chroot gave me this, and it seems to be what I need as it seems systemd was having a bad day for a while

Nope, still same black screen :frowning:

5

I don’t think systemd is the problem. I’ve updated (5) EOS systems today and all booted OK. What does paclog --after=2025-09-18 return?

6

paclog --after=2025-09-18 (from chroot)

7

Nothing looks out of the ordinary.

8

It doesn’t seem to contain the update I did prior to the system crapping itself, unfortunately.

Does anyone have any other ideas or do I need to nuke everything (I hope not)?

9

Has your efi got enough space? How many kernels installed?

10

371.0 MiB free and 1 kernel (vanilla) installed.

Sorry for the late response, I was asleep.

12

I only spotted this but not sure if it’s normal or not

[2025-09-19T22:03:07+0300] [ALPM-SCRIPTLET] fatal library error, lookup self

13

This has been happening since dracut 106; hasn’t caused me any problems.

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14

Never have I had a boot issue like this, even trying to switch to GRUB doesn’t fix the problem, same black screen. Either I did the conversion wrong or something bigger is up.

15

Perhaps it is due to the SystemD update. 258.2 causes problems for some older computers. Downgrade to 258.1 or 257.9-1.

Bootloaders not booting - archlinux bbs
Please consider backporting #39034 to fix booting from older UEFIs

Edit: If you decide to try it, remember to downgrade all systemd files.

16

I wouldn’t be surprised, I’ll try when I’m free.

17

Everything updated fine here, hope you can fix your issue!.

changelog: /usr/share/doc/systemd/NEWS

18

Well it seems downgrading systemd to 257.9-1 fixed it for me, as I can now boot like normal. I’ve added systemd and friends to ignorepkg for now.

How is systemd breaking something that early in the boot process?

Anyways, I found the solution, thanks for everything.

1 Like
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