Bug 54452

Summary:	Out of disk space makes console unusable
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Alan Cox <alan>
Component:	gdm	Assignee:	Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status:	CLOSED DEFERRED	QA Contact:	Aaron Brown <abrown>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	high
Version:	7.3	CC:	jirka
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2002-02-11 22:25:54 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Alan Cox 2001-10-08 16:21:54 UTC

Fill the / partition as a user (not even root needed)
Reboot

If you are using gdm then the sequence goes

starting xfs        Ok
but xfs then bombs out with no disk space to make its socket

gdm starts, and dies and starts and dies looping continually. A non
technical user is basically at "reinstall" level when this happens so I
count it as pretty serious.

We need to issue a gdm that is at least smart enough to bail out when X
wont start, or back off a sensible timeout. Note that Jirka's experimental
fall back to VGA mode stuff won't help in this specific case either.

I've not tested kdm

Alan

Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2001-10-08 16:37:37 UTC

gdm is supposed to detect looping, and does normally. Perhaps its detection
involves writing to disk...

Comment 2 Alan Cox 2001-10-08 16:44:56 UTC

I don't believe so. You see flick flick flick pause flick flick flick pause type
patterns so does gdm exit when looping and whatever ran it rerun it straight off ?

Simple demo its not gdm using disk

telinit 3
/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs stop
telinit 5

and it loops and loops...

Comment 3 George Lebl 2001-10-09 03:15:23 UTC

eek, pretty evil. I'm trying but I cannot reproduce a state where the loop of
death would not kick in.  What I am thinking is happening is gdm is dying of some
segfault or something of the sort.  The main gdm is not supposed to exit at any
point unless instructed to.  Perhaps try running the main gdm process in gdm and
see if it does exit.  One of the problems here is running gdm from init, which
is evil!!!!  gdm should really run as it's own separate server.  Then init would
never try to restart it.

Does this happen with 2.2.4.1?  I'd also be interested in the output in syslog
with gdm debugging turned on (in gdm.conf section debug do Enable=true).

Comment 4 George Lebl 2001-10-09 04:06:04 UTC

I meant 2.2.4.2

Comment 5 Havoc Pennington 2002-02-11 22:25:49 UTC

Needs to be verified with the new gnome2 gdm alex and jrb are building in rawhide

Comment 6 Havoc Pennington 2002-02-25 17:48:12 UTC

Kicking this upstream as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72541, 
closing on Red Hat level. We will probably get the fix with the GNOME 2 
migration.