sylvie5d ago
ok lets get this in order
i update alpine, normal stuff for me i always pick the weirdest times for updates
i hibernate 5 minutes later
that was timed at right the damn moment the bootloader was being regenerated
that fucks up the bootloader
i cannot boot, it cannot find the disk, the initramfs image is incapable of seeing thin circular data storage medium devices, ok after hopelessly trying to recover it from within itself i give up and decide to try again with a real recovery environment
i fight the alpine installer for a moment, i manage to unhibernate it in a broken sort of way after finishing(?) the update, but in reality it does not make much more progress boot wise (read only isnt even helpful in recovery how tf do you recover a read only fs)
i regenerate the entire damn bootloader, kernel image, initramfs, extlinux, THE BOOT ENTRY FROM THE STUPID TABLE DISAPPEARS what the fuck 
Show threadsylvie4d ago

hey @kzimmermann hardware scheduled maintenance for me so ill be reinstalling with UEFI and i hope disk encryption sooner rather than later, tried pestering a friend about it but decided its not worth it, i believe you use full disk encryption, do you have some recommendations for casual full disk encryption?

i do not need deniable encryption, i think i can manage to memorize a passphrase with sufficient entropy, not particularily worried i would forget it (if i did then it wasnt important after all, and i would rather depend on remembering it than on a device that can be stolen or lost), i can figure out the algos to pick (argon2id if its available and likely some chacha)

Show threadEF3d ago
@sylvie @kzimmermann ZFS is good on #alpinelinux with or without encryption. It is not hard to install.
Show threadsylvie3d ago
@EF i am somewhat worried over the overhead of copy-on-write filesystems on an laptop with a celeron and an HDD, when (if) i eventually switch the main device to disk encryption i could properly consider if i want the benefits of these more sophisticated filesystems (currently i doubt i would find much use in multiple volumes in one partition)
Show threadEF3d ago

@sylvie just my view but ZFS means a single layer and I run 15yo laptops. It does fine on those. If RAM is a concern, perhaps it is unwise as a FS. However, ZFS is far lighter than suggested unless it is used for very heavy I/O.

By the way, it should be simplish to regenrate the bootloader. One of the Wiki articles explains how to open recover encrypted installs. Mostly involves booting a USB image, chrooting amd rerunning the kernel script. https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/LVM_on_LUKS may be useful.

LVM on LUKS - Alpine Linux

Show threadsylvie3d ago

@EF the existing install isnt encrypted and i successfully managed to regenerate the bootloader: it boots visibly doing nothing, mounts the filesystem read-only, and i cannot figure out how to regenerate it in a way where it actually works as opposed to this bizzare state where it does none of the proper system initialization

forgot to mention before, 4GB RAM, which "is enough" but is also low enough for me, typically running 8GB without swap, to not object to having some swap available

Show threadEF

@sylvie are there any clues in dmesg? Tried to remount / as rw? Once rw try rerunning upgrade or apk fix.

Have you found https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Initramfs_init

Or try the Alpine IRC channel. There are some clever people on there.

Initramfs init - Alpine Linux

Apr 11 at 10:10amWeb
Show threadsylvie3d ago

@EF i thought alpine didnt have an irc (i might be confusing it with something else and its possible i have in fact been on the irc...... trying to get wayland working... huh sounds oddly familiar)

seems like i missed the $(ls /mnt/lib/modules/) part? but that would just specify the kernel which i did figure out, the problem isnt that i could regenerate all of this but that all my attempts caused it to not regenerate... fully?

still though im going to just reinstall the system then drop in all my data all 4 gigabytes of it half of which is presumably ~/.cache/, its really probably not worth recovering the system if it means ill just be too lazy to ever reinstall with disk encryption and then wont do disk encryption on the next device because "i havent ever done it" or w/e, im gonna break things and im gonna learn from it 🔥