CR Repo Update Disaster For My Desktop.

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I have a CentOS 7.5 desktop workstation with dual nvidia graphic cards running three monitors. I use the i915 motherboard graphics adapter for the third monitor with bumblebee to work the magic to enable the three contiguous work spaces. I use the kmod nvidia drivers for the two graphics cards. This has worked without a hitch for 5 months until this weekend. I enabled the CR repo and did the yum update. Some 800+ rpms were offered and all seemed to resolve depenancies OK, so yes it was started. The updates completed and all looked good, until the reboot. Initially the new kernel would boot just fine but the gdm/gnome desktop hung. No login offered. Reboot and select previous kernel, great, offered login, but the desktop barely settles before gnome crashes, and gdm restarts and I get to login afresh. Eventually I have, removed bumblebee, disabled the on board graphics adapter, reinstalled gnome multiple times, removed nvidia drivers, blown away my .gnome and related folders, tried as a new user, (no customizations of the desktop) all to no avail. Current situation is under my user account cannot get stable desktop for more than 10 seconds before it sends segfault error 4 in libc-2.17.so What do I do now?
Seems that these big updates need to be applied in sub batches with reboots in between so that one can back out. Any ideas appreciated. Rob

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16 thoughts on - CR Repo Update Disaster For My Desktop.

  • My question is what will change with the final release of 7.6? I thought the CR repo usually holds all updates with the exception of CentOS-release, or are there more updates to come? I had the impression that in the past, the final release brought only cosmetic changes with the CentOS-release being updated.

    Regards, Simon

  • I’ve seen zero problems on Desktops I’ve installed CR on.

    If CR has issues, as you say you’d expect 7.6 to have problems. If things are failing with CR updates, you really want to investigate what’s going on.

    jh

  • +1 as 7.6.1810 is exactly 7.5.1804+updates+CR so only missing packages are CentOS-release/anaconda and install tree/media ..

    So if there are issues with CR, using the list and bugs.CentOS.org would be good. BTW : the goal of CR is exactly to find those issues earlier and then write Release Notes with workarounds/warnings

  • Sorry for top post, my android BlueMail will not let me insert at the bottom. I have found that tracker-extract seems to trigger a segfault. I note this is not updated in CR, but comes from base. Removal of tracker seems too harsh as it has dependant modules like brasero, evince, grilo, nautilus and totem. Maybe there is an obscure relationship in tracker that need attention. Stumpped.

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  • So in an effort to narrow down the problem I also have an old Samsung laptop – i5 with an nvidia card – all up-to-date 7.5 – I thought I would try a more conservative upgrade approach.

    first updated to the CR kernel with yum upgrade kernel*

    then after successful reboot did an update to gdm* and gnome*

    another reboot and all is well

    then update of xorg* (only 20 files)

    Now it will not boot – keyboard is non responsive so cannot even do a Ctrl Alt F2 to access a shell. Old kernel is also non boot. Left this machine for now and back to my main desktop workstation.

    No idea if this xorg problem relates to my original workstation – so on that machine I did a downgrade of xorg* – seemed to complete ok, but on reboot and login – still the same problem.

    As the only clue in the logs is the libc segfault I did a downgrade of glibc – this too seemed to work but no change to the system – gnome crashes after 5 – 10 seconds.

    Wasted far too much time on this, no idea what to do now so I have done a fresh 7.5 install and all works again – just need to install all the additional stuff I use each day, but at least I have a desktop that functions.

    I will wait until 7.6 is officially released, watch the list for a week or two and then with much fear and trepidation give it a go.

    As a long time user of CentOS (well over a decade – I started with 5.x workstations, then had a couple of 6.x, and used two 7.x machines, not counting my servers), I must observe that the core server stuff “just works” e.g. mail, mysql / mariadb, postfix, dovecot, apache, php. Even the migration to libreoffice was okay.

    The major version upgrades each gave an all over better desktop experience. What has also happened however is that some of the 7.x upgrades have been difficult to deal with – one of the recent firefox updates lost all my local password databases which I do not back up to the cloud for obvious reasons. Unable to resolve the instability after many hours of testing and trialing combinations, I have left firefox and moved to vivaldi – we’ll see how that works. As upstream seems to include more bleeding edge versions of major desktop utilities such as firefox, stability has been compromised.

    Now with this latest CR update, I have no idea if it is gnome, gdm, xorg or some other component, but to have two quite differently configured machines both loose their desktops, I am unhappy. The use of roll back of over 800 files just didn’t pass the transaction test thus that too was futile.

    I thought the approach I used with my laptop today was sufficiently cautious, yet it caught me and I am still trying to work out what to do next.

    As always, happy to entertain ideas and suggestions. My main workstation however is now safely working at a clean install of 7.5, thus cannot do further tests there, life must go on, four days of down time is far too much.

    Also let me give a heartfelt thanks to the hard working CentOS team, I
    see the more and more difficult task you need to navigate with each major update, you do an outstanding task, and I am most grateful!

  • The big question remains, what did you install which is not part of the base CentOS distribution? You mentioned vivaldi browser, Nvidia stuff, what else did you install from EPEL or other sources? I mean, is it possible in your case that something causes problems now which is not part of CentOS?

    Regards, Simon

  • Where does it stop booting? Can you remove ‘rhgb quiet’ from the kernel command line and see how it is booting? Also, are you using UEFI boot or the old BIOS boot?

    7.6 has been released, so you should expect these packages to start arriving on all your CentOS 7 systems.

  • It is possible – I have now got a new clean install of 7.5 and am slowly making that workable, thus unable to do further testing until I do the
    7.6 upgrade, which I will hold off until Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1650634
    is resolved – this looks like the exact issue my laptop has stumbled in to. Will need to use a rescue USB to try the xorg downgrade on that as it also crashes the keyboard.

  • on the laptop it seems I have the Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1650634
    problem. It is bios boot.

    My workstation has UEFI boot, but it has now been clean installed with
    7.5 and until there is a fix to the above bugzilla i’ll hold off on doing much other than update the kernel.

    Thanks for response, i will use the removal of rhgb quiet.

  • Yes, seems this is the laptop issue, will prove tomorrow. Not too keen on this, would need to find a detailed howto as I have not done any rebuilds for a number of years. I presume that RH will at some point release a fix for this?