Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 10662
X crashes on reboot/halt
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
I'm not sure this bug is related to initscripts or X or kdm... I upgraded (from 6.1) to RedHat 6.2 and I have a strange problem: each time I select "halt" or "reboot" from the kdm login screen, kdm ends and _restarts_ (instead of ending normally, and return to the text console listing the shutdown items). But in the background, the system initiates its shutdown sequence. After a while, at some time during the shutdown sequence (I guess it's the xfs shutdown), the X server crashed and presents a text screen full of debug details and registers. The computer shutdown process seems to be unaffected, as it ends by halting or rebooting the computer. But it's at least ugly... Stelian.
I have the same problem with KDM. However, if I use GDM instead of KDM, everything would go fine.
I have installed the downloadable 6.2 version (iso) in three different machines, 2 from scratch and one upgrade and I have the same problem
That would be a kdm bug. Seems fixed as of the rawhide kdebase packages.
How am I supposed to upgrade to the rawhide kdebase package? This package has dependencies on many rawhide packages, and I intend to use a stable redhat version, not the potentially unstable rawhide one. Since this is a severe bug, a kdebase errata seems to be much more appropriate to me... Stelian.
I have a similar problem. In addition to server crashes on shutdown, sometimes the shutdown procedure fails on my system and it switches to runlevel 3. I've done a strace on kdm (prefdm): strace -f -ff -F -o kdm.trace -p 4438 http://leo.wu-wien.ac.at/kdmtrace/ It looks like kdm calls halt (or "shutdown -r now" as I've specified in kdmrc) and shutdown execs /sbin/init 0, so everything should be fine. I have no idea why init switches back to runlevel 3...
See also bug #11028 and bug #11598
Hi there! I played around with the rawhide-packages and didn4t get a solution for this prob, so I took a closer look at it. In the last line of /etc/inittab is an entry for the displaymanager (x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon). This entry tells init to restart the displaymanager each time it dies. When you shutdown your system, kdm is restarted when it dies until the next runlevel is reached (init only restarts kdm while the system is in runlevel 5). My solution is to replace that line with: x:5:once:/etc/X11/prefdm This tells init to start the displaymanager only once in that runlevel. Init won4t restart it anymore when it dies. But that doesn4t matter, since kdm will now run in daemon mode and restart its child when it is dying. Hope this helps. Sven
Thank you for your inittab-workaround. The problems are gone! But questions remains: Why doesn't everybody have this problem? And why are there different behaviours like - normal shutdown - X crash - switch to runlevel 3 - runlevel 3 login-prompt freezed? I'd like to understand the problem in detail.
Thanks backhaussv@seeg.sharp-eu.com, your solution seemed to fixed the problem for me. I had this problem with KDM in RedHat 6.2. This problem did not occur for me in RedHat 6.1. I have installed RedHat 6.2 on two different PC's and only one of them has the problem. Since the problem is apparently random I was wondering if it was X and/or hardware related? The PC without the problem is an old Pentium 133 with an S3 Trio video card. The PC with the problem is a Celeron 300 with Nvidia TNT(1) video card.
fixed in Red Hat 7.0
This problem isn't completely gone as of Redhat 7.1. See my comment on Bug #11323