Arch Linux

greyeye

Member

Registered: 2017-11-03

Posts: 2

Upgrade a large amount of packages when some of them causes boot issue

About 2 months ago I ran pacman upgrade and encountered a black screen after reboot. This had happened a few times before and the culprit packages have usually been linux, gdm or nvidia so I tried downgrading linux and nvidia (that were among the upgrades) with live USB. This did not help so I then downgraded all the packages that were upgraded before the last boot and that solved the problem. However, the exact package which caused the issue remained a mystery as I didn't have time to solve it back then. I haven't updated the system after that and now there are A TON of packages to upgrade. It will be a total pain if I upgrade all of them and some package still causes black screen on boot which I think is likely to happen. So my question is: Is there a controlled way to do the upgrade so that I can avoid possible boot issue or at least make it manageable to downgrade the packages with live USB if problems occur? I've looked through the wiki but I haven't found a way to upgrade the packages in small patches to make it more manageable (and afaik that is not really recommended). I know there's 'Ignorepkg' option in pacman conf but that's not very usable as there're so many packages to upgrade. So, any idea what I should do?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,209

Re: Upgrade a large amount of packages when some of them causes boot issue

Never look at downgrading anything as the default fix. Always look for other solutions first, if your graphical boot hangs see if you can boot to a console, that way you can immediately eliminate a large number of potential causes. In this case the likely culprit will be GDM crashing trying to initialize unsupported KMS functionality, configure it to not attempt to do this and use Xorg by default: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GD … rg_backend

Change that, update everything, come back with a pacman.log/journal log should the problem persist.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: Upgrade a large amount of packages when some of them causes boot issue

I second the above as the proper approach to this situation.  But a direct answer to your question (which you really should use at the moment) is that the arch linux archive could be used to upgrade "little by little".  This is not by just updating a subset of packages to their current version, but rather by incremementally updating everything to a specific date (e.g., update your entire system to be in sync with the repos as of 2 months ago, then again to 6 weeks, then 1 month, etc).

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman