Horked-up system, Fedora 11

[Vaughn Treude]

Ryan Rix wrote:
> Hello Vaughn,
> Please see my comments and suggestions below...
>
> Vaughn Treude wrote:
>   
>> 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
>>     
>
> oh noes! This sounds like a problem with the DRM kernel module... NOTE that 
> it has nothing to do with Digitial Rights (or restrictions :-) ) management. 
> It's Direct Rendering Modules for graphics.
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> This is how it sounds to me... 
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> Please either attach that to a post here, pastebin it, or mail it to me 
> offlist. This is probably the root of your issue. If it aborted during the 
> install phase (which it most likely wouldn't do, but you never know) you 
> have a good chance of hosing your system.
>
>   
Thanks, Ryan! I will mail it to you offline, as the bug report file is 
quite large.
The yum.log file, however, is dated late September, which was the last 
time I ran it manually. Not surprisingly, it shows no errors.

Vaughn
> Also a copy of /var/log/yum.log would help as well
>
>   
>> 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!
>>     
>
> Please try a Yum update. If that doesn't fix your system, at least we will 
> have some more information about what is incorrect.
>
> Ryan Rix
> Fedora KDE-Ambassadors-News
>
>