Talk Proposal - What If the Bug Never Looked Like a Bug?

[JILL RAVALIYA]

Hi Vinod and Team,
I'd like to submit a lightning talk proposal for the April 11 meetup.

ABSTRACT:

Some bugs fail with an error. Some bugs succeed silently and leave you with a kernel panic on the next reboot.

This talk covers two bugs I investigated in February 2026, both on the same machine, five days apart.

In the first, a post-install script detected a missing initrd and returned exit 0. GRUB had no reason to think anything was wrong. The system panicked on next reboot.

In the second, two drivers loaded for the same GPU at different times. The display manager crashed on every boot and recovered silently — no error in dmesg, nothing in the journal unless you read everything.

Both bugs were filed on Ubuntu Launchpad. Both were findable by reading the complete boot log — not filtered errors.

The audience will leave with a concrete understanding of how silent failures appear in the boot chain, why log filtering hides them, and what to look for when a system misbehaves without telling you why.

OUTLINE:
1. Silent failures vs loud failures — why the distinction matters (1 min)
2. Bug 1 — kernel panic with no warning (3 min)
   - DKMS failure → run-parts stops → initrd never created
   - 55-initrd.install returns exit 0 on missing file
   - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/2141741
3. Bug 2 — black screen that wasn't a crash (3 min)
   - simpledrm on minor 0, amdgpu on minor 1
   - GDM crash-restart cycle invisible in dmesg
   - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/2142087
4. One lesson — read full logs, not just errors (2 min)
5. Q&A (5 min)

GITHUB:
- https://github.com/jillravaliya/kernel-panic-study
- https://github.com/jillravaliya/amdgpu-simpledrm-handoff-bug

SPEAKER :

I'm a final year Chemical Engineering student at GTU. I previously worked in industrial operations at Reliance Industries and have since been focused on Linux kernel development. I've filed two upstream kernel bugs on Launchpad, built a character device driver running in Ring 0, and completed LFD101, LFD103 and LFD137 from the Linux Foundation.

Thank you for considering this proposal.

Jill Ravaliya
jillah...@gmail.com
https://github.com/jillravaliya
https://linkedin.com/in/jill-ravaliya

[Ravi Bangoria]

+1

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[Diksha]

+1

On Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 11:49 AM JILL RAVALIYA <jillah...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[shaileshkumar]

+1

[Yash Vyas]

+1

[Priyajit Ghosh]

+1

[Uddhav Phatak]

+1