Kernel 7.1 unpacks the initramfs asynchronously, which races /init: the
early /proc, /sys, /dev, and /run mounts fail with EPERM while unpacking
settles, so plymouthd exits when it can't read /proc/cmdline and encrypted
boots fall back to an unthemed text LUKS prompt. Boot still completes only
because the kernel passes key=value cmdline params to init as environment
variables and devtmpfs is automounted.
Force synchronous unpacking via initramfs_async=0 until the race is fixed
upstream: in the packaged defaults for fresh installs, and via migration
for existing systems.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
