Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

Bug 4846

Summary:	gdm.pid...is this a bug?
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	watha
Component:	gdm	Assignee:	Elliot Lee <sopwith>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.0	CC:	moof
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-11-02 17:17:32 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 watha 1999-09-02 03:43:33 UTC

Some background: I'm running RedHat 6 on an old DEC Pentium
90 computer with
onboard S3 video.

While working to set up Samba on my computer, I tried to
restart
Enlightenment.  The system crashed, and I had no choice but
to power down in
order to reboot.  Now it's doing something utterly bizarre.

I'm set to runlevel 5, so it's supposed to go into x
automatically.  The
computer tries to do so...or at least I think that's what
it's doing.  The
screen just keeps flashing on and off, over and over, for
about a minute.
When it finally stops, this message appears, over and over:

"According to /var/run/gdm.pid, gdm was already running
(697), but seems to
have been murdered mysteriously."

This appears about a dozen times, with different job
numbers each time.
Then at the end:

"INIT: Id "x" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes."

Sure enough, the cycle repeats itself every five minutes.

When I try to go into X manually, I get an error message
like this:

Fatal server error:
Cannot open mouse (No such device)

I do have a mouse, and it worked fine up till the system
crash.

Now...what does all this mean?  Help!  Please....?

Comment 1 Michael K. Johnson 1999-09-25 05:11:59 UTC

Have you tried removing /var/run/gdm.pid?

(We're probably moving to a newer version of gdm for the
upcoming release of Red Hat Linux 6.1, which may be the
best way to fix the bug.)

------- Additional Comments From   10/29/99 23:11 -------
This also happens on my AlphaStation 4/200 machine running RedHat 6.0
Linux.  Something is killing the X font server (xfs), and gdm can't
start a new session until xfs is restarted.  If you log in through
another terminal when this is happening as root and
type "/etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs start" then the problem disappears. (once
anyways).  I do not know why xfs is dieing.  There is no good
information in the logs.

Comment 2 mkp 1999-11-01 19:32:59 UTC

The ``murdered mysteriously'' message is informal and not critial. gdm
gracefully handles when a pidfile exists but no daemon is running.

I have implemented /sbin/init-like repawn control to my working tree
to avoid restarting X servers.

Regarding the xfs bug: No clue, but I've seen it on several machines.

Comment 3 Elliot Lee 1999-11-02 17:17:59 UTC

A compiler bug causes xfs to crash under certain conditions. This one
is fixed in 6.1.

Comment 4 openshift-github-bot 2017-08-24 02:00:54 UTC

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/openshift/openshift-docs

https://github.com/openshift/openshift-docs/commit/58b6a26d7f64d15036f0cc8b979e446874c51fc3
Merge pull request #5064 from bfallonf/aggre_4846

Issue 4846 Fixed link to aggregated logging yaml