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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