Mysterious kernel module load failure message upon startup. Possibly USB audio related.

English Hardware
1

Recently, my system has started doing something rather peculiar. Basically, as soon as I hit enter on the grub menu, I see a kernel module load error message briefly flash up on the screen while the system is loading. The message says to check systemctl status systemd-modules-load.service, but when I check that after the system starts, everything looks fine:


systemctl status systemd-modules-load.service
systemd-modules-load.service - Load Kernel Modules
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-modules-load.service; static)
   Active: active (exited) since Sun 2016-04-10 14:14:42 PDT; 26min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-modules-load.service(8)
           man:modules-load.d(5)
  Process: 473 ExecStart=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-modules-load (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 473 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   CGroup: /system.slice/systemd-modules-load.service

I believe this has something to do with the generic USB audio kernel module for my Schiit Bifrost DAC, based on the following log messages seen in the journalctl output:


Apr 09 08:19:31 KodomoDragon systemd[1]: Failed to start Load Kernel Modules.
Apr 09 08:19:31 KodomoDragon systemd-journal[179]: Journal started
Apr 09 08:19:31 KodomoDragon systemd-modules-load[175]: Failed to insert 'snd_usb_audio': No such file or directory

lsmod | grep usb shows the following:


snd_usb_audio         188416  1 
snd_usbmidi_lib        36864  1 snd_usb_audio
snd_hwdep              16384  2 snd_usb_audio,snd_hda_codec
snd_rawmidi            36864  1 snd_usbmidi_lib
snd_pcm               135168  5 snd_usb_audio,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_controller
snd                    94208  14 snd_usb_audio,snd_hwdep,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_usbmidi_lib,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_seq_device
usbhid                 53248  0 
usbcore               262144  7 snd_usb_audio,ohci_hcd,ohci_pci,snd_usbmidi_lib,ehci_hcd,ehci_pci,usbhid
usb_common             16384  1 usbcore

Interestingly, my DAC appears to be working fine. I have my system configured with HDMI audio disabled and the Schiit DAC set as the default device for all sound, and I haven’t had any problems with playing music or internet video. I really haven’t the foggiest idea what’s wrong here, or how to correct the startup error. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. It’s a pretty annoying problem, and does extend the bootup time by quite a few seconds for some reason.

2

I’m not completely sure here.

As far as I know, “systemd” is started while running from the “initrd”. And maybe there’s a problem in the “initrd” that is corrected once the root file system has been mounted – possibly a missing driver.

If everything is working once it is booted, then it is probably safe to ignore the message. You could try rebuilding the “initrd”, but that has probably already been done with some updates.

3

That makes two of us. :slight_smile: If I had to guess, I would say this started happening after I allowed the system to install a rather large number of updates (more than 40). That’s the only thing I can think of, but finding which is the offending update and figuring out how to correct it is a bit daunting. No idea how to approach this.
As far as other hardware goes, I’m not running anything overly crazy. It’s a pretty simple system.

Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 Rev 4.1 with an FX-9590 and 8GB of memory.
USB 3.0, FireWire, and onboard sound disabled in BIOS.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 running the default open source driver.

The only interesting thing plugged into the system is that USB DAC.