Bug 706661

Summary: After F14 preupgrade, GDM restarts every four seconds and all TTYs are blank
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: r3obh <Robert.Harley>
Component: gdmAssignee: jmccann
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: high Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 14CC: cschalle, jmccann, rstrode
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2011-05-25 06:26:36 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Attachments:
Description Flags
upgrade.log.syslog
none
GDM greeter log none

Description r3obh 2011-05-22 04:36:58 UTC 
Description of problem:
After F14 preupgrade, GDM restarts every four seconds and all TTYs are blank.
Machine is unusable and data is lost (yes I have a backup).

I upgraded an up-to-date Fedora 13 on a generic IBM P-III server to F14 using preupgrade in gpk-update-viewer (actually up-to-date minus one RPM (namely some samba package that I don't care about) because when all RPMs are updated, a gpk-update-viewer bug doesn't allow you the click on the "upgrade" button because the "All software is up to date" window grabs focus).

The 2.6.35.13-91 kernel boots (and older F13 2.6.34 kernels that still live on /boot also boot OK) but GDM just displays the spinning timer in lieu of mouse pointer for four seconds and crashes over and over.  All TTYs (Ctrl-Alt-F2 etc) are blank, except for random pixels in the bottom row of the screen (actually white pixels alternating with black ones except for the occasional cluster of red and green ones, as if boot-time messages were being displayed one char per two pixels into the bottom row).

Yes I have seen http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F14_bugs, section 4.
Updating selinux-policy (blind since I have no TTYs) doesn't help, booting with selinux=0 doesn't help.

When rebooting after "touch /.autorelabel" I get an SELinux error about "invalid regex" due to SELinux depending on some crappy Python scripts that don't escape braces in filenames such as "/home/username/.mozilla/firefox/3oyvweryv4.default/extensions/{45abc452-df63-5271-a1c4-6b15323819f0}/platform/Linux/components/WeaveCrypto.so".

So maybe it's an SELinux bug.  This would only be the umpteenth time.

- R
Comment 1 r3obh 2011-05-24 18:25:38 UTC 
Created attachment 500672 [details]
upgrade.log.syslog

I can boot to a TTY with "enforcing=0 3" and log in.  Without the "enforcing=0", I can boot to run-level 3 but can't log in at all, instead "no shell: permission denied" flashes by.  Any attempt to startx, or to boot into runlevel 5, results in blank TTYs and crashing gdm.
Comment 2 r3obh 2011-05-24 20:41:18 UTC 
Created attachment 500695 [details]
GDM greeter log

Various errors inside.
Comment 3 r3obh 2011-05-25 06:26:36 UTC 
I didn't find any solution so I installed F15 on top of the broken F14 upgrade.

FWIW, I had a stock F13 install, which I purposely kept clean and didn't mess around with, yet an upgrade trashed it completely.  I'm not totally clueless but days of effort could not fix it.  SELinux was clearly involved.  Searching for help turned up the usual SELinux bad attitude, plus some suggestions that made no difference: boot with autorelabel=1, try restorecon, fixfiles...

I've a disk clone of the original F13 which still works fine and the new F15 install works OK too, although I ran into new bugs straight away e.g., can't remove launcher in Gnome 3, software update got into conflicted state with duplicate packages requiring manual repair, etc.

Whatever.