Bad kernel update for Raspberry Pi 4

[cyberjunkie1970]

This morning, my husband and I were both updating our packages. We each have a Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB, and boot from a USB hard drive. On his computer he updated to linux-rpi 6.1.35-2, rebooted, and it crashed on reboot. We soon realized that his cmdline.txt and config.txt got replaced, so they were pointing to /dev/mmcblk0p2 to be the root partition rather than /dev/sda2. After making that change, his computer now boots but he is unable to startx. He gets the message "addscreen/screeninit failed for driver 0" and gets kicked back to a command prompt. We were only able to get startx to work by commenting out "dtoverlay=vc4-dms-v3d" in config.txt and installing xf86-video-fbdev, which is not an optimal solution. Downgrading to the previous kernel did not fix the issue as I had expected it would and now that we saw linux-rpi 6.1.35-3 is available, that also did not fix the issue. Luckily, I never did the kernel upgrade because of what happened with his I am waiting for this to be fixed. Can anyone tell me what we can do on his Raspberry Pi 4 to undo whatever happened that is making startx not work as it did before, even after downgrading the kernel? And can someone also tell me, since I did not update to 6.1.35-2 on mine, will I be safe to update to 6.1.35-3?

[graysky]

Some quirkiness with pacman overwriting /boot/config.txt and /boot/cmdline.txt should be fixed in 6.1.35-3.

Always inspect pacman's output on an update and act on files it creates such as:
[code]
warning: /boot/config.txt saved as /boot/config.txt.pacsave
warning: /boot/cmdline.txt saved as /boot/cmdline.txt.pacsave
[/code]

Particularly true if you modified the files from the package default as it sounds like you did in your case, see [url=https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Pacnew_and_Pacsave]this[/url] link.

[cyberjunkie1970]

Thanks, graysky. I updated the kernel to 6.1.35.3 on mine and it was fine. Even after updating on his though there was still the startx issue and his cmdline.txt and config.txt were already fine. There was definitely something else wrong. I ended up copying everything in my boot partition and making his mirror mine, not knowing where the problem was. Now it's good.