Fill the / partition as a user (not even root needed) Reboot If you are using gdm then the sequence goes starting xfs Ok but xfs then bombs out with no disk space to make its socket gdm starts, and dies and starts and dies looping continually. A non technical user is basically at "reinstall" level when this happens so I count it as pretty serious. We need to issue a gdm that is at least smart enough to bail out when X wont start, or back off a sensible timeout. Note that Jirka's experimental fall back to VGA mode stuff won't help in this specific case either. I've not tested kdm Alan
gdm is supposed to detect looping, and does normally. Perhaps its detection involves writing to disk...
I don't believe so. You see flick flick flick pause flick flick flick pause type patterns so does gdm exit when looping and whatever ran it rerun it straight off ? Simple demo its not gdm using disk telinit 3 /etc/rc.d/init.d/xfs stop telinit 5 and it loops and loops...
eek, pretty evil. I'm trying but I cannot reproduce a state where the loop of death would not kick in. What I am thinking is happening is gdm is dying of some segfault or something of the sort. The main gdm is not supposed to exit at any point unless instructed to. Perhaps try running the main gdm process in gdm and see if it does exit. One of the problems here is running gdm from init, which is evil!!!! gdm should really run as it's own separate server. Then init would never try to restart it. Does this happen with 2.2.4.1? I'd also be interested in the output in syslog with gdm debugging turned on (in gdm.conf section debug do Enable=true).
I meant 2.2.4.2
Needs to be verified with the new gnome2 gdm alex and jrb are building in rawhide
Kicking this upstream as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72541, closing on Red Hat level. We will probably get the fix with the GNOME 2 migration.