Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11323
X restarting on shutdown
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
When selecting "shutdown" or "shutdown and restart" on KDM, X dies as expected, but then restarts (KDM also reappears). It subsequently dies a second time complaining of a SIG 11 (I think) and reporting that it has generated a core dump. This might be a problem with KDM. I have not tried it under GDM.
I have had the same problem. I had no luck fixing it. I also tried many different types installs (custom gui, custom text, kde workstation gui,...). They all behaved the same.
this is a kdm issue.
This behaviour has now been reproduced on Redhat 7. Note however that the error messages generated by the X-server (now 4.0.1) are different.
The problem is that /etc/inittab runs [kgx]dm as :respawn: rather than :once:. kdm dies, init restarts it before it's told to go to runlevel 3.
*** Bug 11598 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 18523 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Per beros' comment above, editing the following line in /etc/innitab did the trick original "x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon" change to "x:5:once:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon" smooth shutdown/reboot now.
Except, you don't want this behavior; you want it to respawn if it dies.
This really is a kdebase/kdm bug. Let me explain what I've found in the past few days: I can verify that this problem exists on RedHat 7.1 (and RedHat 6.2 with kde-2.1.1 installed). The specific problem is about the same as the original poster: Upon selecting Shutdown from kdm, the shutdown sequence is not displayed on the screen, and in the case of RedHat 6.2, the X/kdm restarts, only to die soon afterward with kdm restarts itself. This problem has existed going all the way back to kde-1.1.2 on RedHat 6.2, and I've never been able to fix it, other than editing /etc/inittab to have: x:5:once:.... but this is not optimal, and breaks other things (like logging in remotely via XDMCP). I have finally tracked the source of this down to a patch in kdebase: kdebase-1.1-waitkdm.patch I'm not sure what this patch is supposed to do, but in the case of kdm-spawned-from-inittab, it does that wrong thing. It results in a kdm that restarts itself upon clicking Shutdown. I've rebuilt kdebase-2.1.1-8 without that patch applied, and kdm now functions as expected... showing the shutdown sequence to the screen.
Can this bug please be reopened? It is not resolved and it needs to be fixed. (-: To verify the problem is still there, try this: from the kdm login window, click Shutdown to Console. ( It won't work. kdm will restart itself.).
So, is this also affect shutting down? When I shutdown from KDM, it looks like KDM exits with an error/warning message and the system hard reboots. It is not calling shutdown - I don't see any of thethe regular shutdown messages. When the system reboots, it had to run fsck on the file systems. This is BAD news, folks.
Yes, this affects shutdown's too, and will lead to the symptoms you describe: not seeing shutdown messages, and many times an fsck. You're welcome to try my fixed rpm package (without redhat's wait-kdm patch that fixed the problem for me) from my website: http://www.math.unl.edu/~rdieter/Software/Linux/kde/rh71/
Fixed in 2.1.1-13