Bug#1072840: Acknowledgement (sddm: Sddm crashes regularly)

[Aurélien COUDERC <libre@coucouf.fr>]

Le samedi 21 juin 2025, 18:41:59 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Helge Kreutzmann a écrit :
> Hello Aurélien,

Dear Helge,

> did you have a chance to test this? This is really anyoing.
> 
> I just discovered that it is also the other way round:
> run (as root)
> systemctl restart sddm
> → Console 7 is closed and programms running there are killed.

Yes, I could reproduce this.
It is due to SDDM declaring a Conflicts=getty@tty7.service in its service file. See [1] and [2].

I seem to remember that in the distant past this would have been required because display managers had to run on tty7 not to step over user sessions or for managing some interaction with plymouth or something…
I’m not sure this still makes much sense today, and you will probably be fine removing that Conflicts relation with tty7 from the unit. Feel free to give it a try and report back.

I’d say it’s a pretty niche use case since the default install has 6 ttys enabled by default and I’m not sure many people are both using 7 or more ttys and using sddm.

And I don’t feel confident changing this in the Debian package so close to the release. I’m not sure if there are any interactions with other components we could break this way. But we can certainly do the change early in the forky cycle.


[1] https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/3rdparty/sddm/-/blob/master/debian/sddm.service?ref_type=heads#L5
[2] /usr/lib/systemd/system/sddm.service


Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien