[SOLVED]Black Systemd Boot Screen after Uninstallling xf86-video-intel

tydynrain · 2018-02-01 10:27:10

Hello all.

I'm not exactly sure where to post this, but I figured that here is likely a better choice. This is my first post asking for assistance, and I do so very hesitantly, as I'm hoping that I'm able to provide sufficient useful information. I've been troubleshooting this issue all day; lots of web searches, reading hordes of posts, and testing and experimenting to see if I could solve it myself. I'm usually able to figure things out for myself, but this one has me a bit stumped.

So here's the issue: For the past few weeks, likely after some upgrades or other, either the kernel, xorg, mesa, or the xf86-video-intel driver, I'd been getting very random yet frequent xorg crashes that would log me out to my greeter, as well as only slightly less frequent complete UI lockups, requiring a hard reboot. After a gagglefuck of searching, reading, researching, testing, and experimenting, I was finally able to mostly stop this behavior by completely disabling graphic acceleration with an /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf. That worked for the most part, but it was far from ideal. I'd been reading that the xf86-video-intel driver was quite buggy, and also basically unmaintained, and that it was recommended to use the xorg modsetting driver.

I have 3 separate Arch installs, 2 on separate laptop hard drives that I use (surprisingly, I know) in my laptop, and 1 installed on a mostly intel-based HP Pavilion desktop. Today I decided to test out the xorg modsetting drivers, so on all 3 installs I uninstalled xf86-video-intel and removed any /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf that I had. After doing so and rebooting, one of the laptop hard drive installs and the desktop install booted up fine and the modsetting driver seemed to be working great. One laptop hard drive install, however, keeps hanging at the Systemd boot screen (after the kernel messages) with the "Starting 236" in the upper left on a black screen, where it sits until I either go to a login terminal with ctrl+alt+F2 (etc...), or shut the system down with the power button.

Systemctl shows that lightdm-legacy.service (I use Plymouth) keeps failing to load, and no matter what I have tried up to this point, nothing has resolved the problem. It's just so strange, as all 3 systems are set up in a very similar manner, and went through the video driver transition perfectly, and one failed completely. I have a backup of that hard drive, and I could just restore it to the state before I removed the xf86-video-intel driver, but I want to troubleshoot this so I am able to fix this, and understand why it happened.

My laptop has a first generation Intel Core i5 560M (Westmere) and 5th generation Intel HD Integrated Graphics, the desktop system has a second generation Core i3 2130 and second generation Intel 2000 HD Integrated Graphics. It's so curious to me that one of the laptop hard drive installs had no trouble, and one flopped, since aside from having a very similar setup, they use the same hardware.

If anyone has any idea why and how on earth this happend, I would very much appreciate some ideas, as I don't seem to be makiing very much headway.

Thank you for your patience and assistance.

Tydyn.

Last edited by tydynrain (2018-02-03 09:51:07)

V1del · 2018-02-01 10:43:31

Check your journal and if you get a core dump of the failing processs. If you still can switch to a VT you aren't really freezing simply the graphical setup is broken.

tydynrain · 2018-02-01 11:05:25

V1del wrote:

Check your journal and if you get a core dump of the failing processs. If you still can switch to a VT you aren't really freezing simply the graphical setup is broken.

From a chroot into the failing-to-boot system, running 'coredumpctl list', lightdm is oddly not in the list, even though I tried to run it from the terminal when I ctrl+alt+F2'ed, and the message said that there was a segfault and core dump. I suppose it would be better to simply reboot into that install and ctrl+alt+F2 to a login terminal to run commands. I'll do that tomorrow, as it's past 3AM here, and I need to get some sleep. I'll check back tomorrow.

Last edited by tydynrain (2018-02-01 11:07:08)

tydynrain · 2018-02-01 20:00:49

OK, here is the lightdm log after I logged into the failed-to-boot system and ran 'lightdm --debug'

[+0.00s] DEBUG: Logging to /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log
[+0.00s] DEBUG: Starting Light Display Manager 1.24.0, UID=0 PID=4651
[+0.01s] DEBUG: Loading configuration dirs from /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d
[+0.01s] DEBUG: Loading configuration dirs from /usr/local/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d
[+0.01s] DEBUG: Loading configuration dirs from /etc/xdg/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d
[+0.01s] DEBUG: Loading configuration from /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
[+0.01s] DEBUG:   [LightDM] contains unknown option session-wrapper
[+0.02s] DEBUG: Registered seat module local
[+0.02s] DEBUG: Registered seat module xremote
[+0.02s] DEBUG: Registered seat module unity
[+0.02s] DEBUG: Using D-Bus name org.freedesktop.DisplayManager
[+0.03s] DEBUG: Monitoring logind for seats
[+0.04s] DEBUG: New seat added from logind: seat0
[+0.04s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Loading properties from config section Seat:*
[+0.04s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Starting
[+0.04s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Creating greeter session
[+0.04s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Creating display server of type x
[+0.05s] DEBUG: Using VT 7
[+0.05s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Starting local X display on VT 7
[+0.05s] DEBUG: XServer 0: Logging to /var/log/lightdm/x-0.log
[+0.06s] DEBUG: XServer 0: Writing X server authority to /run/lightdm/root/:0
[+0.06s] DEBUG: XServer 0: Launching X Server
[+0.06s] DEBUG: Launching process 4664: /usr/bin/X :0 -seat seat0 -auth /run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
[+0.06s] DEBUG: XServer 0: Waiting for ready signal from X server :0
[+0.06s] DEBUG: Acquired bus name org.freedesktop.DisplayManager
[+0.07s] DEBUG: Registering seat with bus path /org/freedesktop/DisplayManager/Seat0
[+0.07s] DEBUG: Loading users from org.freedesktop.Accounts
[+0.07s] DEBUG: User /org/freedesktop/Accounts/User1000 added
[+0.08s] DEBUG: Process 4664 exited with return value 127
[+0.08s] DEBUG: XServer 0: X server stopped
[+0.08s] DEBUG: Releasing VT 7
[+0.08s] DEBUG: XServer 0: Removing X server authority /run/lightdm/root/:0
[+0.08s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Display server stopped
[+0.08s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Stopping session
[+0.08s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Session stopped
[+0.08s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Stopping display server, no sessions require it
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Stopping; greeter display server failed to start
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Stopping
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Seat seat0: Stopped
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Required seat has stopped
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Stopping display manager
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Display manager stopped
[+0.09s] DEBUG: Stopping daemon

And ps aux | grep lightdm

 
(chroot) [root@The-Nexus-Tribe /]# ps aux | grep lightdm
root       515  0.0  0.1 275456  8488 ?        SLsl 11:11   0:00 /usr/bin/lightdm
root       523  4.3  1.3 397612 108840 tty7    Ssl+ 11:11   2:47 /usr/lib/xorg-server/Xorg :0 -seat seat0 -auth /run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
root       798  0.0  0.0 259924  6972 ?        Sl   11:11   0:00 lightdm --session-child 13 20
root      1620  0.0  0.0  10884  2360 pts/0    S+   12:15   0:00 grep lightdm
root      6757  0.6  1.4 1128012 113592 ?      Sl   11:15   0:22 /usr/bin/nemo /run/media/tydynrain/Arch/var/log/lightdm

And lsmod | grep intel

(chroot) [root@The-Nexus-Tribe /]# lsmod | grep intel
intel_powerclamp       16384  0
kvm_intel             225280  0
kvm                   700416  1 kvm_intel
ghash_clmulni_intel    16384  0
snd_hda_intel          45056  3
aesni_intel           188416  4
snd_hda_codec         151552  4 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_generic
aes_x86_64             20480  1 aesni_intel
snd_hda_core           90112  5 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_generic
crypto_simd            16384  1 aesni_intel
snd_pcm               118784  4 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_core,snd_hda_codec_hdmi
snd                    90112  14 snd_hda_intel,snd_hwdep,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_codec_idt,snd_timer,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_generic,snd_pcm
glue_helper            16384  1 aesni_intel
cryptd                 28672  3 crypto_simd,ghash_clmulni_intel,aesni_intel
intel_cstate           16384  0
intel_ips              24576  0
crc32c_intel           24576  0
intel_agp              24576  0
intel_gtt              24576  2 intel_agp,i915
agpgart                49152  3 intel_agp,intel_gtt,drm

I'm still getting a handle on the various logging services, so I ask for patience as I orient and go deeper. I'm having a challenging time accessing the relevent systemd logs for lightdm. If I'm logged into the failing to boot system, I have no way of copying the output, and if I'm doing it from a chroot, I have no way of accessing the relevant information. Frustrating. It would seem that error code 127 has to do with a missing path.

Last edited by tydynrain (2018-02-01 20:36:08)

tydynrain · 2018-02-03 09:48:46

I was finally able to figure out the problem, and resolve it, though it took 2 days of research and testing, and I came close to completely hosing my system, but in the end, I triumphed.

After having nothing that I tried work, out of frustration, I uninstalled everything but the base and base-devel groups with

pacman -Rns $(comm -23 <(pacman -Qq | sort) <((for i in $(pacman -Qqg base base-devel); do pactree -ul "$i"; done) | sort -u))

to remove as much that could be causing the problem as possible. Once I did that, I began using

systemctl list-dependencies graphical.target

and

systemctl list-dependencies multi-user.target

and either reinstalling and re-enabling the various missing dependencies, or if they could not be set up again at the moment, disabling them for the moment.

Once I had all dependencies resolved, I finally ran

systemctl set-default graphical.target

which is apparently what fixed the issue. Obviously I didn't have to go through the first two steps, but I learned a great deal more about Arch, and Linux in general as I continued to go deeper, as I always do. I truncated some of the steps in my process, but that's the gist. I'll mark the post as solved.

Tydyn.

Last edited by tydynrain (2018-02-19 03:53:14)

Arch Linux

#1 2018-02-01 10:27:10

[SOLVED]Black Systemd Boot Screen after Uninstallling xf86-video-intel

#2 2018-02-01 10:43:31

Re: [SOLVED]Black Systemd Boot Screen after Uninstallling xf86-video-intel

#3 2018-02-01 11:05:25

Re: [SOLVED]Black Systemd Boot Screen after Uninstallling xf86-video-intel

#4 2018-02-01 20:00:49

Re: [SOLVED]Black Systemd Boot Screen after Uninstallling xf86-video-intel

#5 2018-02-03 09:48:46

Re: [SOLVED]Black Systemd Boot Screen after Uninstallling xf86-video-intel

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