Failed Kernel Upgrade

The other day I upgraded my Gentoo kernel (after realizing I was about 7 kernel updates old). After compiling and setting up Grub, I rebooted and received this error:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
RAMDISK: ran out of compressed data
invalid compressed format (err=1)
UDF-fs: No VRS found
List of all partitions:
…
No file system could mount root, tried: …
Kernel panic – not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,0)

After painful research, I finally discovered the problem: I ran out of space on my boot partition.

Apparently genkernel does not complain when it runs out of space to compile the kernel. It just stops and outputs the same message it would it if succeeded.

A “quick” use of parted to allocate more space to the boot partition, and re-compiling the kernel solved the problem. It’s just sad that genkernel doesn’t bother reporting the fact that it ran out of space.