7.6 Update broke X

[sheikki]

I know it's in the release notes:

X fails to start on certain systems with an Nvidia card See RHBZ 1650634.

RHBZ 1650634 is of no help to me,

e.g.

If I run this command:
yum downgrade xorg-x11-drv-nouveau xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-drv-qxl.x86_64 xorg-x11-drv-vesa xorg-x11-drv-dummy xorg-x11-drv-v4l xorg-x11-drv-ati xorg-x11-drv-vmware xorg-x11-drv-fbdev xorg-x11-drv-intel.x86_64

and reboot X starts back up again as expected.

Does not fix it for me

Another solution:

Bug resolved by rebuilding xorg-x11-server-1.20.3-1.fc29 [1] for 7.6.

I would rather not do that. I don't want to do this manually every time I update..

Other solutions.. ???

Why was 7.6 even released with such a big bug and no proper workaround?

[TrevorH]

We inherit any upstream RHEL bugs and since we aim for bug-for-bug compatibility, this is actually working as designed. Not what you want to hear but...

The instructions on the RH page are for RHEL where all packages from all point releases are in the same repo. That means the yum downgrade finds the 7.5 copies of the packages and downgrades to them. CentOS has a repo per point release so the 7.5 packages are not in the current base/updates repos and since there is only one copy of those packages available in 7.6, your yum downgrade probably did nothing and told you so.

To downgrade to the 7.5 versions on CentOS you will need to yum --enablerepo=C7.5.1804-base,C7.5.1804-updates downgrade your-list-of-packages

[sheikki]

Thanks for the reply. I know it's not really the fault of CentOS, it's just incredibly frustrating to start the week with something like this..

Your suggestion doesn't work as it leads to this error with a bunch of packages:

Code: Select all

Error: Package: xorg-x11-drv-fbdev-0.4.3-25.el7.x86_64 (C7.5.1804-base)
           Requires: xserver-abi(videodrv-23) >= 0
           Available: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.5-5.el7.x86_64 (C7.5.1804-base)
               xserver-abi(videodrv-23) = 0
           Available: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.5-5.1.el7_5.x86_64 (C7.5.1804-updates)
               xserver-abi(videodrv-23) = 0
           Available: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.19.5-5.1.el7_5.0.1.x86_64 (C7.5.1804-updates)
               xserver-abi(videodrv-23) = 0
           Removing: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.20.1-5.1.el7.x86_64 (@updates)
              ~xserver-abi(videodrv-24) = 0
           Downgraded By: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.20.1-5.el7.x86_64 (updates)
              ~xserver-abi(videodrv-24) = 0
           Available: xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.20.1-3.el7.x86_64 (base)
              ~xserver-abi(videodrv-24) = 0

Edit. My system works just fine if I boot up with an older kernel so it's not like I'm dying or anything..

[jlehtone]

Note: I have a system with NVidia GTX 970 and have not encountered RHBZ 1650634 (or any other bug) due to the 7.6 update. (I did load from CR couple days prior the Base was rebased.)

Therefore, that bug is not 100% reproducible (at least not any more). The question is, was it 1650634 or something different that you did encounter?

[TrevorH]

You have to specify each and every package on a yum downgrade command. It doesn't expand the selection like update/install do, you have to name every package that you want to downgrade on the same command.

[sheikki]

You have to specify each and every package on a yum downgrade command. It doesn't expand the selection like update/install do, you have to name every package that you want to downgrade on the same command.

Ah, thanks. I didn't even think of that. Anyway, I'm not a big fan of this approach to fixing the problem. I guess, I will just use the older kernel for a while and pray for an update that fixes everything..

The GPU of this box is by the way NVS 310

[sheikki]

So I finally got tired of booting the older kernel and started working on this..

My card is stuck at nvidia-390 driver (as seen e.g. here). So whatever, when I updated to CentOS 7.6, maybe yum-plugin-nvidia prevented updating the nvidia drivers. Maybe it was something else, I don't know. Anyway, the "new" nvidia-390 driver is a little bit different to the old one. All I had to do was to remove the old driver and then install the "new" driver (there were some new dependencies as well, below the relevant part from /var/log/yum.log

Code: Select all

Mar 15 13:31:10 Erased: nvidia-x11-drv-32bit-390.87-1.el7_5.elrepo.x86_64
Mar 15 13:31:11 Erased: nvidia-x11-drv-390.87-1.el7_5.elrepo.x86_64
Mar 15 13:31:11 Erased: kmod-nvidia-390.87-1.el7_5.elrepo.x86_64
Mar 15 13:37:37 Installed: vulkan-filesystem-1.1.73.0-1.el7.noarch
Mar 15 13:37:37 Installed: libvdpau-1.1.1-3.el7.x86_64
Mar 15 13:40:14 Installed: kmod-nvidia-390xx-390.116-1.el7_6.elrepo.x86_64
Mar 15 13:40:27 Installed: nvidia-x11-drv-390xx-libs-390.116-1.el7_6.elrepo.x86_64
Mar 15 13:42:01 Installed: nvidia-x11-drv-390xx-390.116-1.el7_6.elrepo.x86_64

Now all is well