[Solved] Problem after updating glibc (Arch Linux 64bit)

R00KIE · 2009-08-24 02:17:02

Well, once again after an update the system went down very ungracefully and this time I'm sure I can blame a glibc update (warning and errors started showing up after glibc was or should have been updated), after a pacman -Syu (can't find the errors/warnings in the logs, maybe those should go there as well, I smell a bug report ) this is what I can gather from the logs:

[2009-08-24 01:40] synchronizing package lists
[2009-08-24 01:40] starting full system upgrade
[2009-08-24 01:41] upgraded kernel-headers (2.6.30.1-1 -> 2.6.30.5-1)
[2009-08-24 01:41] upgraded tzdata (2009k-1 -> 2009l-1)
[2009-08-24 01:41] upgraded glibc (2.10.1-3 -> 2.10.1-4)
[2009-08-24 01:41] upgraded sqlite3 (3.6.16-1 -> 3.6.17-1)
[2009-08-24 01:41] upgraded subversion (1.6.4-1 -> 1.6.5-1)

The last time http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=75694 I was a bit unsure if suspending could have caused some problem but since then I have never suspended or hibernated my notebook, after the glibc update I have once again seen the "cannot execute scriptlet" error (or something similar) and the system is yet again unrecoverable .... pacman -r did not help to solve the problem and if things go as last time neither will chrooting or trying to reinstall to the affected partition without deleting almost everything under /.

I'm using ext4 as my filesystem for /, may this be some kind of problem with ext4 or is a glibc update similar to a flaky atom bomb, as in if you get lucky then all goes well and nothing explodes else big pain in the neck cleaning after the damage is done.

Maybe I should start updating my system in the morning ... these things seem to always happen when I update my system just before I'm about to turn off my pc and go to sleep >_<.

Any ideas of how to recover from this without the need to reinstall everything will be appreciated ... now I'm off to sleep as it is a bit late here.

Oh and please feel free to move this if this is not the best place to put this thread, because it is a package upgrade issue it seemed the right place to post even though it is related to arch64.

Edit:
Solved and figured out why things have gone wrong twice ^^;;
The problem is really simple and is due to the user changing something (looking back, I should have known better, it really was a bad idea and I was asking for trouble ).

A while back I have changed /lib64 to be a link to /lib so I could install matlab (it complained about not finding a few files with the proper arch filesystem directory structure). The thing is that this latest glibc update has 2 links inside /lib64, because mine was a link to /lib things have gone very wrong (I suspect that /lib64 was updated after /lib). After this I have reinstalled arch and moved matlab to a centos chroot I already have to run other programs so I believe I will not have any more problems of this kind. But let this be a _big_ warning to any user considering to solve _any_ problem by using any kind of symlinks , I have figured it out the hard way.

On the other hand, I've been looking into the update script of glibc and it seems things have long been moved from /lib64 to /lib so is /lib64 still really needed? The only things inside are 2 links to /lib after all.

I guess there is always one upside to things one good thing is that it seems ext4 had some recent changes that to be used need a reformat, for now I'm back with ext3 everywhere but when kernel 2.6.31 comes out I'll change back to ext4 (reformat and take advantage of the latest improvements).

Also to anyone reading all this and needing to install something that doesn't play nice with the default arch directory structure (or up to date libs) I strongly recommend that you look into how to use a chroot (do a centos server install somewhere and use the files for your chroot), you will solve 2 problems in one go, the first is the risk of having your system damaged and the other is incompatibility with some newer libraries or directory structure.

Last edited by R00KIE (2009-08-25 14:49:15)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-08-24 02:17:02

[Solved] Problem after updating glibc (Arch Linux 64bit)

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