Bug#1080203: initramfs-tools: USB keyboard stopped working on LUKS prompt

[Henrik Ahlgren]

Package: initramfs-tools
Version: 0.142+deb12u1
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

After upgrading to 12.7 point release and rebooting, I was unable to
enter my FDE LUKS password. The keyboard was totally unresponsive to any key presses
(no asterisks were echoed when typing the password, and hitting Enter did nothing).

My keyboard is a standard USB keyboard (Topre Realforce) connected to
an AMD-based HP desktop machine.

I then booted to a rescue environment from an USB stick and downgraded
initramfs-tools(-core) to the previous version (0.142). After that everything
worked normally again.

According to the changelog, there are several recent keyboard and USB
related changes in this u1 release that might be relevant.

Please take a look, I think this is fairly important since it renders at least
some systems with LUKS unbootable.

Pablo

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 12.7
APT prefers stable-updates
APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.1.0-25-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages initramfs-tools depends on:
ii initramfs-tools-core 0.142
ii linux-base 4.9

initramfs-tools recommends no packages.

Versions of packages initramfs-tools suggests:
ii bash-completion 1:2.11-6

-- no debconf information

[Ben Hutchings]

Control: tag -1 moreinfo

Post by Henrik Ahlgren
Package: initramfs-tools
Version: 0.142+deb12u1
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
After upgrading to 12.7 point release and rebooting, I was unable to
enter my FDE LUKS password. The keyboard was totally unresponsive to any key presses
(no asterisks were echoed when typing the password, and hitting Enter did nothing).
My keyboard is a standard USB keyboard (Topre Realforce) connected to
an AMD-based HP desktop machine.
I then booted to a rescue environment from an USB stick and downgraded
initramfs-tools(-core) to the previous version (0.142). After that everything
worked normally again.
According to the changelog, there are several recent keyboard and USB
related changes in this u1 release that might be relevant.

None of the driver changes are relevant to this system. You are not
using Hyper-V and Linux 6.1 does not include the USB drivers that
initramfs-tools tries to add.

Post by Henrik Ahlgren
Please take a look, I think this is fairly important since it renders at least
some systems with LUKS unbootable.

I can't reproduce this.

I suspect that probing of your USB keyboard is slightly unreliable and
that it just happened to fail on the first boot after you upgraded.
Please try again with the new initramfs-tools packages. Also, if the
keyboard is not detected at first, try unplugging and re-plugging it.

If this problem persists, please send:

- The /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf file
- The output of "lsinitramfs /boot/initrd.img-6.1.0-25-amd64" when
the old version of initramfs-tools is installed
- The output of "lsinitramfs /boot/initrd.img-6.1.0-25-amd64" when
the new version of initramfs-tools is installed

Ben.

[Ben Hutchings]

None of the driver changes are relevant to this system.  You are not
using Hyper-V and Linux 6.1 does not include the USB drivers that
initramfs-tools tries to add.

https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/initramfs-tools/-/commit/5d28dad0e24020d43daf51a5c1e70eb2fe5b4ee2
Both onboard_usb_hub and onboard_usb_dev are listed. From kernel git
history it seems to me that it is the same module, but it was renamed from
_hub to _dev (31e7f6c015d). Bookworm 6.1 kernel does include
onboard_usb_hub I believe, but I don't quite understand what it is exactly.

Well, the driver source is there, but we didn't enable it until later
and then only on arm64.

When I have time, I might try to disable this part from hook-functions to
see if it helps. I would not be surprised if this is was hardware-relevant,
of course.

I suspect that probing of your USB keyboard is slightly unreliable and
that it just happened to fail on the first boot after you upgraded.
Please try again with the new initramfs-tools packages.  Also, if the
keyboard is not detected at first, try unplugging and re-plugging it.

I did try rebooting many times with same results each time. Also tried
unpluggint and re-plugging and even switching to a different keyboard. I
have never seen this issue with 0.142.

Well this is very weird.

Another possibility is a USB hub getting into a broken state which
isn't cleared by rebooting. But this doesn't seem very likely.

Ben.