F30, user sessions fail with: systemd[PID]: PAM failed: Cannot allocate memory - users - Fedora mailing-lists

22 May 2019


      Hi.
After 2 successful upgrades from F29 to F30 and 2 successful full
installations, I decided to upgrade my main machine (that runs fine
since past november, installed in F28 then upgraded to F29).
No luck: unable to login (graphical, textual, ssh) except root.
The journal shows:
May 20 12:31:41 ... kernel: Linux version 5.0.16-300.fc30.x86_64 (mockbuild@bkernel03.phx2.fedoraproject.org) (gcc version 9.1.1 20190503 (Red Hat 9.1.1-1) (GCC)) #1 SMP Tue May 14 19:33:09 UTC 2019
  ...
  May 20 12:37:44 ... systemd-logind[1717]: New session 3 of user fm.
  May 20 12:37:44 ... systemd[1]: Starting User Manager for UID 1005...
  May 20 12:37:48 ... systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty2.
  May 20 12:38:16 ... systemd[1864]: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session opened for user fm by (uid=0)
  May 20 12:38:16 ... systemd[1864]: PAM failed: Cannot allocate memory
  May 20 12:38:16 ... systemd[1864]: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session closed for user fm
  May 20 12:38:16 ... systemd[1864]: user@1005.service: Failed to set up PAM session: Cannot allocate memory
  May 20 12:38:16 ... systemd[1864]: user@1005.service: Failed at step PAM spawning /usr/lib/systemd/systemd: Cannot allocate memory
I add time, from a second textual console as root, to see the "systemd
--user" process reach more than 40 GB of memory before dying.
The lightdm session fails also with the same error.
Tries that do not solved this problem:
- re-installing kernel, systemd
 - downgrading systemd to systemd-239-12.git8bca462.fc29
 - fresh install in F30
Tries that solve this problem:
- adding mem=8192M to the kernel command line
    this machine a 64 G of memory
  - commenting pam_systemd.so from PAM (but want to keep it)
Any idea how to debug that?
Thanks a lot.
-- 
francis