gdm no longer starts at boot (systemd)

azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

For some reason, gdm doesn't automatically start anymore. I'm running systemd-214, but I think it stopped working at the end of May. gdm's last login was the 28:th of May, so I think I was using systemd-212 at the time.

I can't start gdm from the terminal either, it just seems to wait for something. No log or anything. I tried running it with

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 4:27 pm Post subject:

Bear with me, I'l trying to learn this as well. If you could post output so that I could look at them as well, perhaps both of us could learn something. I have not seen this issue show up before so I can't pinpoint an exact issue here.

As you're running systemd, systemd keeps its own log files. Try running

journalctl --since=today|grep gdm

See if there are any interesting data there related to gdm.
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azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

Removed entry.
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azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

Removed entry.
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Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning.

azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

Thank you for an answer, any help I can get is great! =)

Thank you for pointing me to the command to find systemd logs, I fiddled around with journalctl but didn't get logs this good from that by myself. Here is the log for gdm:

(here's a pastebin with the whole log, had to cut it down to the first crash: http://pastebin.com/y8YwKRna)

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2014 9:41 pm Post subject:

Ugh... Now you've gotten into a very weird problem - as you mentioned that startx works but gdm won't pull up X11...

Can't really think of a good explanation for this at all... Hardware issue? I don't know...

Only things I could suggest is trying to re-emerge ati-drivers and xorg-server, but no guarantee that will do anything. Hope someone else has some ideas...
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azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

costel78 · Guru Joined: 20 Apr 2007 Posts: 407

Well, how the things goes after recompile ? I don't want to be pessimistic but I'm 99% sure that there will be no change.... at, least it wasn't for me.
I am in the same boat and seems that the culprit is ati-drivers. gdm it's working fine with radeon kms open-sources drivers. I switched to slim and I'm waiting for better ati drivers.
Gdm is working only with xorg-server-14* and ati-drivers-13*

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 11:58 pm Post subject:

Oh.. I think I sort of remember now. ati-drivers crashed on me or something as well, or it was behaving very poorly with my dual head system.

Try unmasking the latest ati-drivers and emerge that.
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azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

junkY_San · n00b Joined: 19 Jul 2006 Posts: 3

i can confirm the gdm issue on my ~amd64 system. gdm only started once but never again afterwards.
journalctl looks like this:

azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

Has somebody filed a bug regarding this?

Edit: Nevermind, I reported one here: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516816
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eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2014 3:38 pm Post subject:

Ouch. I just got the Gnome 3.12 update and am seeing a very similar problem now.

X11 starts if I run it manually but running it through gdm fails. I think it is indeed an ati-drivers bug but gdm is exacerbating it.

Hmm...

Everyone here having issues when running dual head or are single monitor users having problems as well?

I wonder if it's possible to backtrack to gdm 3.10 ... Probably not but... worth a try.

[EDIT]
I did this to workaround the problem: SLiM works to start Gnome:

franhait · n00b Joined: 02 Aug 2014 Posts: 1

Hi all,

This is my first post, so I hope it can be usefull

Based on all entries and https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516816, I tried masking the latest gdm-3.12.2 to check if the issue is from ATI driver or gdm:

# echo "=gnome-base/gdm-3.12.2" >> /etc/portage/package.mask/gdm

then, I reinstalled gdm, so this downgrade GDM version:

[ebuild R ] gnome-base/gdm-3.10.0.1-r1 USE="branding introspection ipv6 systemd tcpd -accessibility -audit -debug -fprint -plymouth (-selinux) -smartcard {-test} -xinerama" 0 kB

Now GDM is working great.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:49 am Post subject:

Ahh strange I thought that there was a minimum version dependency of gdm needed. I suppose not.
In any case, drivers are not supposed to segfault so though gdm appears to be the problem software, the culprit really is ati-drivers.

I think I found a solution to SLiM if anyone decided to go this route. Unfortunately the login window pops up and is split in half with dual monitors, but does not affect functionality.

To use SLiM you need to simply need to add

export XSESSION=gnome-session

in your ~/.profile

This will let the default auto-chooser do the right thing instead of dumping you back to the login prompt (usually) on default... Not exactly the best solution (the system should select a default and not force the user to make a selection) but it works...
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azp · Guru Joined: 16 Nov 2003 Posts: 456 Location: Sweden

eccerr0r · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 12:33 pm Post subject:

Just another test...

I tried x11-misc/lightdm as well, and it looks like it also works well as a substitute for GDM, except it knows how to handle multiple displays - and the login greeter shows up on one of the two monitors instead of being straddled.

Anyone running into the ati-drivers bug with gdm should try lightdm, and it can be enabled in systemd similarly to slim except using lightdm.

And the new problem: fast user switching is borked... Looks like Gnome/GDM has a slightly different API.

More info about lightdm: Installing in Gentoo: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/LightDM
Controlling LightDM: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM
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heheman3000 · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2006 Posts: 33

I am having this issue too. What a strange error. I've also tried the 14.6 beta driver.

I don't think switching to another display manager is a reasonable solution for this. How do you start gnome with startx?

EDIT: Followed the instructions here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/Configuration#First_Impressions

eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Sep 03, 2014 7:30 am Post subject:

Why do you think using another display manager is not a 'reasonable' workaround?

The real solution is to get ATI/AMD to fix their driver, pretty much everything else is just a workaround. Lightdm produces a very clean graphical login interface that does everything that gdm does, and presents a proper login menu on the two displays.
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heheman3000 · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2006 Posts: 33

I must have been mistaken - I thought that changing the display manager would be changing the window manager as well. Would I still be able to use GNOME 3?

eccerr0r · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2014 3:27 am Post subject:

That's exactly what I'm doing, lightdm is presenting the login and I get the Gnome 3 desktop environment (or any other). I was unsatisfied with SLiM (and xdm) because it didn't appear to have an easy way to shutdown the computer on the login screen (perhaps there's a plugin but didn't look...), but LightDM was able to do that and also offer a user chooser that shows up on one of the two displays. I don't think I really lost any functionality without using GDM other than possibly fast user switching, but oh well. Blame ATI/AMD...
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heheman3000 · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2006 Posts: 33

LightDM is working for me now, too.

JohnY · Guru Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 306

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2014 12:23 am Post subject:

Odd that the OSS driver exhibits the same behavior on some setups. I'd imagine the OSS driver should not crash like the closed source driver with the same behavior... Weird.

I've yet to try the OSS driver. Once I get a PCIe board that I can play with I might have to see how well the OSS driver works on my old HD3650 and X800.
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