Rpm-ostree systems (Silverblue, Kinoite, IoT) can't be updated, they reboot back into the old enviroment

Problem

Due to an unfortunate combination of issues, the Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite and IoT variants that are running a version from 36.20220810.0 and later are no longer able to update to the latest version. You can download the update, but when you reboot, you return to the old environment, not the updated one.

You can see the following errors listed:

$ rpm-ostree status
State: idle
Warning: failed to finalize previous deployment
         error: Bootloader write config: grub2-mkconfig: Child process exited with code 1
         check `journalctl -b -1 -u ostree-finalize-staged.service`

Cause

A broken GRUB2 bootloader update causes the update process to fail.

Related Issues

A Fedora Magazine article was posted related to this problem:

Solution

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You can use these two commands to work around the problem:

sudo find /boot/efi -exec touch '{}' ';'
sudo touch /etc/kernel/cmdline

Afterwards, you can update your system as usual with GNOME Software (on Silverblue) or via:

sudo rpm-ostree upgrade
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