On Fri, 15 Jul 2022 14:41:09 -0400
Chris Murphy <lists(a)colorremedies.com> wrote:
Hi,
I have a request for list regulars.
The Fedora Workstation working group is curious if there's any pattern
or categorization how Fedora installations typically break. i.e. the
installation is successful, the system has been updated multiple times
successfully, and then for whatever reason it breaks.
I find Gnome 3 unusable, so I use Mate instead of Workstation.
Are most failures hardware related? This could be broken down into
hard failure (drive or logic board failed) and soft failure (some
hardware configuration change and reverting the change resolves the
problem).
I have had my share of hardware failures, but it is far more common
for hardware to reach end of support or to be replaced by an upgrade.
What portion of the failures are early boot failures? (Defined as
bootloader, kernel, or early initramfs failures. But excludes being
landed at a dracut prompt.)
Almost none, and those are usually self inflicted.
What portion of the failures land the user at a dracut shell?
Almost none, and those are usually self inflicted. I did have one
case where LVM did not find the root volume group and another with a
corrupt root partition, but those were years ago.
What portion of the failures does the user get to a graphical shell
but can't login?
Never. (Except when a network failure happens and NIS is unhappy.)
What portion of the failures can the user login but there's some
sort
of anomalous behavior?
Most.
I have recently started seeing kernel panics in the nouveau kernel
driver.
Many are new “features” that aren’t ready for prime-time. Two recent
examples are systemd-resolved with bridged networks and pipewire with
bluetooth.
There were also a few upgrades that changed the RPM database format,
and the migration from authconfig to authselect. I feel that the
Fedora Change process and QA are helping here.
(I missed the great a.out to ELF transition).
What portion of all failures are fixable without reinstalling?
All except drive failures.
Is the GRUB "rescue" menu entry ever useful in resolving
problems?
No. I have a bootable USB drive I can use for this purpose, or I can
boot the installer into rescue mode. I remove dracut-config-rescue
and the rescue image from /boot.
The questions list is not complete, feel free to add your own
categorizations / failure patterns that you tend to see.
I have never had hibernation work right.
Applications designed for Gnome 3 often do not play nicely with other
window managers; they show Gnome 3 window decorations instead of what
I have configured marco to show. (Blueberry and evince are two
examples.)
I set a delay in the BIOS so I can access the BIOS menus, and a delay
in the boot manager so I can access its menus.
Jim