Description of problem: gdm fails to start when / is read-only. It is obviously a problem when trying to recover from a file system issue. $ touch /var/tmp/foo touch: cannot touch '/var/tmp/foo': Read-only file system $ sudo systemctl start gdm ... I see two failures: first gdm tries to create /var/log/gdm/greeter.log. Please, please, just log to the journal. This will actually allow users to see this log and "magically" solve this issue at the same time. second gdm tries to open /var/lib/gdm/. This is similar to the case where a user tries to log in and their directory is read-only: we should continue with the limitation that state cannot be saved permanently. That is totally OK, much better than refusing to start. One could argue that in case of the greeter, no private state is needed between boots anyway. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gdm-3.37.1-2.fc33.x86_64 How reproducible: Deterministic Steps to Reproduce: 1. Make /var/log read-only, either by not remounting the filesystems rw, or by using udev.blockdev-read-only with systemd-246+ 2. Try to start gdm
Related upstream bug: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/issues/284
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 33 development cycle. Changing version to 33.
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Fedora 33 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2021-11-30. Fedora 33 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.