Arch Linux

lara

Banned

Registered: 2020-05-04

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

Hi. I upgraded my system using

pacman -Syu

as I always do; this time with

--overwrite /usr/lib\*/p11-kit-trust.so

because of this, but I don't think that's related.

Everything seems to upgrade fine, no weird issues during upgrading that I can see. However, when I reboot I get a problem. My PC boots into GRUB as normal, where I select my Arch installation; it then gives all the standard info, like "Loading Linux linux", etc. It would usually after a few seconds jump to a login screen (I use the default console login screen, so there shouldn't be any desktop environment issues or anything like that); but after the upgrade instead all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor in the top-left. I've given it some time but it doesn't seem to snap out of it (I think I've given it like 20 minutes, while usually I boot within 30 seconds).

I have recovered my PC by adding `single` to the line in GRUB which boots linux, which allows me to downgrade the packages. However, I don't know which package is broken so I have to just rollback everything to an earlier date: 2020/03/25 works but that's chosen just based on when my last upgrade before this one was.

I have no idea why this is happening; the only thing I suppose I can provide is a pastebin of the journalctl of the faulty boot: pastebin link.

If there's any other info I should provide, just let me know.

Last edited by lara (2020-05-04 12:45:25)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,735

Re: [SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

It looks like you're using dhcpcd and there's recently been some trouble w/ its 9.0x update.
For a wild guess i'd disable dhcpcd. If that allows you a "normal" boot, try to start it by hand (non-forking) and see whether it stalls or yells errors at you.

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lara

Banned

Registered: 2020-05-04

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

Thanks! I upgraded my system and ran

systemctl disable dhcpcd

before rebooting, and everything works. Weirdly, I can start dhcpcd after logging in without any issues by doing

systemctl start dhcpcd

. I guess I should just keep it disabled by default until a new update comes out.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,517

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

Or just use a sane systemd service configuration that starts dhcpcd at boot but doesn't make everything else rely on it.  Getting rid of the "Wants" and "Before" entries for network.target in the dhcpcd service file should suffice.  Though a smarter approach would actually be to remove the dependency on network.target from all those things that are failing to start for no good reason.  This, however, might require modifying many unit files.

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

bestBob

Member

Registered: 2020-05-30

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

I collide with the issue too. Last upgrade was 2020-05-13. Before today (Sat 30 May 2020 ) my system worked fine. No packages were installed sinse last upgrade. But in my case all variants in grub menu give the same blinking cursor in the top left. What can I do with this issue from liveCD?

ArchLinux as virtualbox machine.
Vbox 6.1.6 r137129
Linux 5.6.11-arch1-1 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed, 06 May 2020 17:32:37 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,517

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

If it's the same issue in this thread, and this thread is SOLVED, then what you should do is follow the steps laid out in this thread and your problem will be solved too.

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

bestBob

Member

Registered: 2020-05-30

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Get blinking cursor instead of login screen after system upgr

Trilby, you are right (I do not remember about chrooting from archiso to broken system immediatelly). All works fine except linux box get IP address without "systemctl start dhcpcd". Thank you.