Re: PSA: Do not run 'dnf update' inside GNOME, KDE or any other graphical desktop on Fedora 24

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 21:54 +0100, Tom Hughes wrote:
>  
>  It only ever happens on one of my machines, so it's obviously something 
>  about the environment, possibly the graphics card as that's the only 
>  machine I do this on that has nvidia graphics?
>  
>  The weird thing is that there was nothing particularly X related in the 
>  update that caused it this morning. In fact systemd was probably about 
>  the most low level thing that was in the update. 
We've pretty much pinned it down, now. The recipe is: hybrid graphics +
systemd-udev update == X crash. That is, if there's a systemd-udev
update in the dnf transaction, and the system has hybrid graphics, and
X is running while the update runs, X will crash. If you're running the
update in a VT, X will crash but the update will complete OK. If you
run the update inside X, the update process will die when X crashes and
your system will be left messed up.

I'm gonna write up a blog post and spread the word about this a bit,
I'll send the link shortly; if people could spread it around that'd be
great.

The bug reports are
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1341327 (for the X side)
and
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1378974 (for the systemd
side). We are going to try and ensure the bug doesn't affect F25 Beta
installs. An update is pending for F24, but ironically (since the
service restart is in %postun not %post), the transaction to apply the
update will *suffer from* the problem; the update will only ensure that
*subsequent* updates no longer trigger the problem.

Thanks for the data everyone!
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

PSA: Do not run 'dnf update' inside GNOME, KDE or any other graphical desktop on Fedora 24

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 14:04 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  
>  I'm gonna write up a blog post and spread the word about this a bit,
>  I'll send the link shortly; if people could spread it around that'd be
>  great. 
Blog post:

https://www.happyassassin.net/2016/10/04/x-crash-during-fedora-update-whe...

If folks can spread that around, it'd be great. Please let me know of
any errors or inaccuracies you spot.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

PSA: Do not run 'dnf update' inside GNOME, KDE or any other graphical desktop on Fedora 24

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 14:44 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 14:04 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  > 
>  > 
>  > I'm gonna write up a blog post and spread the word about this a bit,
>  > I'll send the link shortly; if people could spread it around that'd be
>  > great.
>  
>  Blog post:
>  
>
> https://www.happyassassin.net/2016/10/04/x-crash-during-fedora-update-whe...
>  
>  If folks can spread that around, it'd be great. Please let me know of
>  any errors or inaccuracies you spot. 
You say:

    If your system has more than one graphics adapter, and you update
    the systemd-udev package while X is running, X will crash. 

I presume you mean that more than one adaptor is connected to a
respective monitor. Just having the adaptor presumably shouldn't do
anything in itself. This is the case with practically all mobos with an
additional video card. Or have I misunderstood?

poc

PSA: Do not run 'dnf update' inside GNOME, KDE or any other graphical desktop on Fedora 24

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 23:08 +0100, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>  
>  You say:
>  
>      If your system has more than one graphics adapter, and you update
>      the systemd-udev package while X is running, X will crash. 
>  
>  I presume you mean that more than one adaptor is connected to a
>  respective monitor. Just having the adaptor presumably shouldn't do
>  anything in itself. This is the case with practically all mobos with an
>  additional video card. Or have I misunderstood? 
We're not 100% sure yet. I'll update my blog post to say 'may well' or
something like that. So far, we have multiple reports of affected
hybrid laptops - those are the ones with both an Intel adapter and an
NVIDIA or AMD adapter, not intended to drive multiple screens but
rather intended to use the Intel adapter when just sitting at a desktop
but the dedicated adapter when running a game, that sort of thing.

We have one report of a system with two 'regular' adapters, both
connected to monitors, being affected.

We have two reports of hybrid laptops *not* being affected.

And we have - so far as I can tell - no reports of a system with just
one video adapter being affected.

So we can't say absolutely all multi-adapter cases are affected, but so
far it seems to be the case that *only* multi-adapter cases are
affected, and given the reports so far, at least a fair percentage of
all multi-adapter cases are affected.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net