Horked-up system, Fedora 11

Vaughn Treude vltreude at deru.com
Sun Oct 11 04:30:09 MST 2009


Hello all:
Recently I upgraded my main Linux desktop to Fedora 11. Everything was 
great, until a couple nights ago I was woken by a frantic beeping coming 
from my office. It was my Fedora machine, which was spewing out weird 
"SELinux troubleshoot" messages. I rebooted the machine, and it was 
running very slowly, so I shut it down.
Today I got time to look at it. The first thing I encountered was an 
ominous error at login, something about "Gnome power management 
configuration" being invalid. Then I discovered X would not start; it 
went to a black screen and appeared to be hung. I could, however, log in 
in console mode.
The first thing I noticed was that my "messages" file in /var/log had 
become humungous.
About the time of the incident, there were several thousand messages of 
this form:

Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_stop] *ERROR* r128_cce_stop 
called
without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_reset] *ERROR* 
r128_cce_reset called without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_start] *ERROR* 
r128_cce_start called without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20
Oct  8 07:41:48 vaughn kernel: [drm:r128_cce_idle] *ERROR* r128_cce_idle 
called
without lock held, held  0 owner f50efd20 f50efd20

I googled this problem and discovered that (duh!) r128_cce refers to my 
ATI Rage 128 driver. I wondered if this card was getting ready to give 
up the ghost. (Previously I'd had occasionally lockups when in the 
screensaver which I decided were probably video-related - when I turned 
of the screen saver, the problems went away.) So I decided to try 
rebooting the machine and logging in under my old Centos install 
(luckily I'd saved that partition.) Centos booted OK, I logged in, and X 
came up fine. So apparently the card is still working, though perhaps 
the driver (in Fedora) got hosed.

So once again I checked out the /var/log/message file in the Fedora root 
partition. In today's entry, the message file contains a bunch of error 
messages of this type:
Oct 10 20:09:43 vaughn gdm-simple-greeter[4745]: WARNING: could not get 
gconf key '/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/recent-languages': Failed to contact 
configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable 
TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system 
crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details -  
1: Could not send message to gconf daemon: Process /usr/libexec/gconfd-2 
received signal 6)

Followed by some of these:
Oct 10 20:09:56 vaughn setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing 
console-kit-dae (consolekit_t) "sys_resource" consolekit_t. For complete 
SELinux messages. run sealert -l 20147317-bf50-4d55-819f-465501e5db55
Oct 10 20:10:22 vaughn sedispatch: AVC Message for setroubleshoot, 
dropping message

and then a whole boat load of these:
Oct 10 20:31:49 vaughn kernel: Xorg:3937 freeing invalid memtype 
e0196000-e019a000

So I don't know if I have a video problem, a network problem, a security 
problem, an X problem, or if the machine's just totally hosed.
Interestingly enough, I had just tried to run a security update on the 
system the night before the Incident. For some unknown reason, it 
aborted. I saved the bug report but it appears to be mostly memory dumps 
which mean nothing to me.
Unfortunately I usually don't bother to back up the root partition on a 
new install until I've gotten everything configured just right. I'd 
finally gotten there a few days before, but hadn't gotten around to 
actually doing the backup.

So, any suggestions? Does it sound like it's so badly hosed I have to 
reinstall?
I suppose I could try the "repair" utility on the Fedora install disk, 
but haven't had much luck with it in the past.
I guess I could go back to the console login and try to do a yum update 
manually. (Yum was working fine for configuring all my media players, so 
I don't know why the recommended security update failed.)
I'd appreciate any suggestions on the best course of  action!
Thanks!

Vaughn T



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