I have continued to research this and I think I found the problem.
I also think the dbus update timing mentioned in the subject is entirely coincidental. I hope I haven't caused any unnecessary excitement or work for anyone in the dbus package team. My apologies if I did.
A few months back we ran into a package conflict with the initramfs-tools that we have used since the beginning. I believe the conflict was with systemd, but I could be mis-rememberiung that. We were able to switch to tiny-initramfs which did the same job (we thought) and didn't have a conflict.
Since that switch and before our recent problems, we rebooted one server which just happened to be different from all our others in that it hever had the initramfs package conflict and was still running the original initramfs package.
On a hunch (since I really have no clue about how debian boot actually works) I compared initram image file sizes and used lsinitramfs to list the content of the initram images built with tiny-initramfs and the standard initramsfs. The results:
- the tiny-initramfs image file size was under 1MB and lsinitramfs listed a very few modules to be loaded and specifcally NOT the piix4_smbus driver
- the standard intramfs image file was ~ 34MB and included the missing
usr/lib/modules/6.5.0-4-amd64/kernel/drivers/i2c/busses/i2c-piix4.ko
So based on my very sketchy knowledge of Debeian boot and what I am seeing on our working servers, I think the problem is with tiny-initramfs not including the needed kernel driver modules in the image file OR our not understanding how to correctly use tiny-initramfs.
The fix as far as we are concerned with our servers that are running has been to switch back to the standard initramfs package (the previous conflict is gone now thank goodness) and rebuild the initram images, which we have done.
I have not yet figured out how to fix our two broken servers since we can't boot them to update them. Since we have several identical running servers and can mount and manipulate the file system of the dead servers, is it possible to just copy a good initrd.img-6.5.0-4-amd64 to the dead server /boot directory and boot to that image? That sounds way too simple to me.
-- Andy Dorman Ironic Design, Inc. AnteSpam.com
