On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 06:55:09PM +0800, Huacai Chen wrote:
BootLoader (Grub, LILO, etc) may pass an identifier such as "BOOT_IMAGE= /boot/vmlinuz-x.y.z" to kernel parameters. But these identifiers are not recognized by the kernel itself so will be passed to user space. However user space init program also doesn't recognized it.
KEXEC may also pass an identifier such as "kexec" on some architectures.
We cannot change BootLoader's behavior, because this behavior exists for many years, and there are already user space programs search BOOT_IMAGE= in /proc/cmdline to obtain the kernel image locations:
https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-ab-recovery/blob/master/util.go (search getBootOptions) https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-ab-recovery/blob/master/main.go (search getKernelReleaseWithBootOption)
So the the best way is handle (ignore) it by the kernel itself, which can avoid such boot warnings (if we use something like init=/bin/bash, bootloader identifier can even cause a crash):
Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=(hd0,1)/vmlinuz-6.x root=/dev/sda3 ro console=tty Unknown kernel command line parameters "BOOT_IMAGE=(hd0,1)/vmlinuz-6.x", will be passed to user space.
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Huacai Chen chenhuacai@loongson.cn
V2: Update comments and commit messages.
init/main.c | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+)
diff --git a/init/main.c b/init/main.c index 225a58279acd..c53863e5ad82 100644 --- a/init/main.c +++ b/init/main.c @@ -545,6 +545,7 @@ static int __init unknown_bootoption(char *param, char *val, const char *unused, void *arg) { size_t len = strlen(param);
- const char *bootloader[] = { "BOOT_IMAGE=", "kexec", NULL };
Where is this magic set of values now documented? Each of these need to be strongly documented as to why we are ignoring them and who is adding them and why they can't be fixed for whatever reason.
thanks,
greg k-h