Upgrading 7.5 ==> 7.6

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hI ALL!

There have been a large enough number of people posting here about difficulties when upgrading from 7. to 7.6 that I’m being somewhat paranoid about it.

I have several machines to upgrade, but so far the only one I’ve dared to work on (least critical if it goes bad) is my new-to-me-but-used laptop.

First I did a ‘dd’ backup of the whole drive onto an external USB drive then did the upgrade. Since I use the Mate desktop, I enabled the epel testing repo (per postings on Mate troubles at the time of the upgrade).

Result: Boots to GDM just fine, but Mate is a black screen. Switching to Gnome, works fine, but I can’t stand Gnome. Not knowing what else to try I restored the dd backup.

Later I inserted a spare HD and did a new install from the DVD
media. This installed without issue, but now no desktop works. Switching to a console (CTRL-ALT-F2) I did a full “yum update”, which installed quite a few packages, but upon reboot nothing had improved. So I added the epel repo (and testing) and installed Mate. Ditto, nothing had changed.

This laptop is fairly old, and according to lshw, has a RV635/M86
[Mobility Radeon HD 3650]I] video chipset, in case it matters. CPU is identified as: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz

Having previously installed 7.5 on it without trouble, on which Mate works just fine, I wonder what could have become so broken that neither an upgrade nor a fresh install works.

I have, as I said, several other machines to upgrade, too, some of them have Nvidia grahics (esp. my main desktop box, which also uses Linux software RAID-1) and all run Mate. Then there is a netbook (low priority)
a couple of VMs (in virtualbox) and at work several other VMS as well as bare-metal on a Lenovo deskside machine, and I’m afraid to do an update on all of them because I need them to be in usable condition. The Lenovo box in my office is somewhat urgent, as I am about to retire and turn it over to someone else who doesn’t know much about Linux.

I’d appreciate any advice I can get on how to get these systems upgraded without breaking them.

thanks in advance for your help!

Fred

13 thoughts on - Upgrading 7.5 ==> 7.6

  • …
    …

    Can you clone the VMs first? That will give you machines to bang on until you’ve hammered out all the bumps in the upgrade process. Then for the production VM, take a pre-upgrade snapshot you can roll back to when the process finds a new way to go sideways.

  • One more data point: After taking a dd backup of the HD in my Acer Aspire One netbook (screaming 1.6 GHz Atom, dual core!!), I did the
    7.5 to 7.6 update and it went perfectly fine, although it had 800
    packages to update, so it was kinda slow.

    Do any of you know if the various Nvidia issues, and problems upgrading software RAID1 systems have reached resolution? I haven’t seen postings here regarding solutions for those problems, and knowing my luck, I would hit both of ’em on my personal desktop.

    Thanks in advance for any response!

    Fred

  • I didn’t see any issues with RAID. I think those problems arise only if you have old RAID devices created with older CentOS releases than 7. Those were probably created with 0.9 metadata version which may be a problem. Currently 1.2 metadata version is created and I didn’t see any issues with it.

    Maybe others can confirm my conclution.

    Regards, Simon

  • I had major issues with two machines, both with nvidia cards. I found that the SL spin of CentOS 7 has fixes for the xorg problems. Akemi Yagi posted the solution which worked fine – it was just difficult to get the required files onto the broken device with no gui.

    The submitter of RHBZ 1650634 is a developer of Scientific Linux. The xorg packages in SL 7.6 have been published with the referenced patch applied. If you so wish, you could install their packages.

    ftp://linux1.fnal.gov/linux/scientific/7.6/x86_64/updates/security/

    Note the “sl7” tag instead of “el7”.

    Akemi

  • […]

    This is a known issue, and was mentioned on this list recently. The problem is that Mate in EPEL needs to be updated to work with CentOS
    7.6. Perhaps keep an eye on changes to the EPEL repo before attempting the upgrade again.

  • Thanks, Liam, for the info.

    Since it IS working on the netbook I’m hoping that means that whatever needed updating has been updated.

    So, I compared the versions on my desktop with those on the netbook, and find that mate_dictionary, mate-disk-usage-analyzer, mate-screenshot, mate-search-tool, mate-system-log, mate-system-monitor, mate-utilsk, mate-utils-common all had a minor version bump. Some from 1.16.1-1 to
    1.16.1-2, one from 1.16.0-1 to 1.16.0-2.

    I know there are other packages that do not contain “mate” in their names, but I don’t know which they are.

    So, do you (or anyone else) happen to know which Mate packages are/were in need of update?

    thanks again, in advance.

  • Not sure, MATE is working just fine for me, versions range from 1.16.0
    to 1.16.3

    yum list |grep “mate” |grep -v “@epel” |grep -v “devel”
    mate-menus-preferences-category-menu.x86_64
    classmate.noarch 1.3.1-2.el7
    epel classmate-javadoc.noarch 1.3.1-2.el7
    epel f22-backgrounds-mate.noarch 21.91.0-1.el7
    epel mate-common.noarch 1.16.0-1.el7
    epel mate-netspeed.x86_64 1.12.0-1.el7
    epel mate-sensors-applet.x86_64 1.16.1-1.el7
    epel mate-themes-extras.noarch 3.14.7-1.el7
    epel php-league-climate.noarch 3.2.4-1.el7
    epel workrave-mate.x86_64 1.10.16-1.el7
    epel xmonad-mate.x86_64 0.11-12.el7 epel

    Some of those obviously are not mate packages, but those are the only mate packages I do NOT have installed and it is working, so if mate is not working I wonder if the issue is something other than the packages.

  • Good question, Alice. I guess I need to go back to trying the upgrade again on my new-to-me-but-still-pretty-old laptop, where it failed a week or so ago. If that works I’ll be slightly less paranoid about trying it on my main desktop box, which I definitely do NOT want to screw up.

    Or maybe plug in a 1tb usb drive and install on it and see what happens.

    Fred

  • So,… for my new-to-me-but-old laptop, I plugged in a USB drive and saved a dd image of the laptop’s HD into a file on the USB drive.

    Then I ran the upgrade, which went without any notable issues. Reboot works fine. the X login screen appears, I enter my credentials and log in. It goes through a lot of motions and eventually stops with the snowy/gray background from the Plymouth boot screen, but with nothing at all on it, and no mouse pointer. X is clearly running, but is not displaying my Mate desktop.

    I saved aside /var/log/messages and /var/log/Xorg.0.log, uploaded subsets of them to pastebin. the /var/log/messages subset is https://pastebin.com/MJR2T3Xz, while the xorg.0.log is https://pastebin.com/wrucd77z.

    Note the repeating (apparent) failures at the end of Xorg.0.log.

    I don’t know what any of this has to do with Mate, but would appreciate your assistance.

    (I ran the update on a netbook and it went fine. both have Intel CPUs, the netbook has intel graphics, and the new-to-me-etc. laptop has a Radeon graphics chipset. I dunno if it makes any difference, or how to tell, or how to fix it, if it does.)

    Suggestions appreciated, in advance!

    Fred

  • They are fine, just normal chatter you get in there.

    However, the /var/log/messages does contain some issues with the video driver e.g.:

    Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: ring 0 stalled for more than 10221msec Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU lockup (current fence id 0x00000000000002f3 last fence id 0x0000000000000302 on ring 0)
    Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: ring 0 stalled for more than 10722msec Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU lockup (current fence id 0x00000000000002f3 last fence id 0x0000000000000302 on ring 0)
    Dec 22 09:43:38 elitebox kernel: [drm:r600_ib_test [radeon]] *ERROR* radeon: fence wait failed (-35). Dec 22 09:43:38 elitebox kernel: [drm:radeon_ib_ring_tests [radeon]] *ERROR* radeon: failed testing IB on GFX ring (-35).

    That’s indicative of either a GPU (i.e. graphics card) problem or a driver issue. You can search on the 2nd from last line and there are lots of hits on it but no real solution – I’ve seen “limit memory use to 3G”, “change PCI slot”, “OpenGL bug” to “buy different card”.

    Almost certainly not. It’s a kernel problem.

    You might like to try running a different distro on it to check –
    possibly run Fedora 29 Live from a USB drive. If that works OK using an updated Radeon kernel driver then you know the hardware is OK.

    P.

  • a little hard to change the slot or buy a different card, when it is a laptop. :(

    Or perhaps the kernel-ml from elrepo ??

  • I just took a look at the md devices in my raid1, and it seems pretty weird. they were all created by the installer (Anaconda) when I first installed C7, yet 3 of them are 1.2 and one is 1.0.

    # mdadm –detail /dev/md124
    /dev/md124:
    Version : 1.2
    Creation Time : Wed Dec 2 23:13:09 2015

    # mdadm –detail /dev/md125
    /dev/md125:
    Version : 1.2
    Creation Time : Wed Dec 2 23:13:21 2015

    # mdadm -D /dev/md126
    /dev/md126:
    Version : 1.2
    Creation Time : Wed Dec 2 23:13:22 2015

    # mdadm -D /dev/md127
    /dev/md127:
    Version : 1.0
    Creation Time : Wed Dec 2 23:13:18 2015

  • 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 are the same, except for where in the volume they are located.  1.0 is at the end of the volume, which makes it compatible with software that is ignorant of md RAID (such as UEFI), so it will be used for the /boot/efi system partition. Generally, 1.2 is preferred
    (since the volume can be resized without affecting the metadata location) and will be used for all other volumes.