Solve Ubuntu 24.04 Kernel Panic on a Macbook Air

Yea i know, odd title. A while ago my father brought me his 12 year old Macbook Air which i installed with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Budgie because MacOS was not supported anymore. Even after twelve years and with a bended case (dont know if my father of one of his grandchildren had sit in it) it yust works. Even the battery is in decent condition, compared to my Lenovo L14 which already has its third battery in 5.5 years. Ubuntu Budgie also feature a nice MacOS like gui, so it was quickly installed.

Now i have that Laptop in front of me and all i see after turning it on is an Ascii Tux on purple background and the message: „Kernel Panic! VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)“ – yeah great.

So i asked ecosia, my search engine of choice, because i didnt had that problem before. According to some reports i need to enter the grub menu because something might have gone wrong generating the Initramfs. But how to enter that menu on a Macbook, took me some tries to figure it out. Turn of the Laptop (long pres on the Powert Button), hold ESC, start the Laptop. Now you need good timing. You hold ESC too short you run into the Kernel Panic, press it too long and the grub menu disappears. The sweetspot seems to be short befor the End of the Apple chime.

Now you can try to use a working Kernel version, the newest one is that one which is corrupted.

So i am in the OS right now, so at least it is not completely messed up. I try an apt update and apt upgrate and i am greeted with debug messages that Initramfs can not be generated. Reboot would no be a great idea right now.

Quick fix would be to uninstall the newest Kernel. I digged a bit deeper, my Problem was the broadcom-sta.dkms module which i need for the Macbooks wifi card. Those DKMS binary modules regulary break when i new kernel is released. But what really bothers me: why does Ubuntu Budgie make a Kernel the Grub default if the generation of the Initramfs fails? Thats Bullshit!

The solution was in quickly found on Kuan-Yi Li’s Blog. Manually download the DKMS Modul package and install it. After that run apt upgrade and you are goot to go.

cd /tmp
wget https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/b/broadcom-sta/broadcom-sta-dkms_6.30.223.271-29ubuntu1_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./broadcom-sta-dkms_6.30.223.271-29ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Now you can reboot the Laptop and everything should work as expected. But do yourself a favour. Use apt-mark hold $(uname -r) as well as apt-mark hold linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic to prevent Kernel updates. Also hold the broadcom-sta-dkms package, hopefully this solves the problem. Yes this solution is not ideal, but better than to troubleshoot after every automatic Kernel update.

But really: these are the moment that mal clear that Linux really is not for everyone when a Kernel upgrade failes, but still is added to grub preventing the system from starting.