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/var locked up by xdm/kdm/gdm??



Here is a strange problem which I havn't gotten to the bottom of yet - maybe someone
has seen something similar before...

I did an 'apt-get update;apt-get upgrade' a few days ago, which resulted in a
fairly modest set of module updates. Searching on the day and time concerned
shows these as being the ones:

-rw-r--r--  1 root root  1908084 2006-02-25 23:21 gnupg_1.4.1-1sarge1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   781604 2006-02-25 23:22 gpdf_2.8.2-1.2sarge3_i386.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   573308 2006-02-25 23:23 tor_0.1.0.17-1~~sarge.1_i386.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     1282 2006-02-25 23:23 xpdf_3.00-13.5_all.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    56526 2006-02-25 23:23 xpdf-common_3.00-13.5_all.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   656924 2006-02-25 23:23 xpdf-reader_3.00-13.5_i386.deb
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  1242172 2006-02-25 23:23 xpdf-utils_3.00-13.5_i386.deb

During the update, I had tried starting a remote X session on the console from KDM,
and this resulted in a system freeze.

After a hard reset to reboot the system, I found the boot sequence went through as
normal until it got to the point where the screen cleared before starting KDM, but
then the system froze again. It behaved as though the disk was frozen - my logged
in sessions responded to commands until I did anything that would need a disk access,
then it froze..

I managed to reboot into single user mode, and removed KDM from runlevel 2 (as well as
3 and 4, for consistency with normal conventions). After doing this, the system started
normally, and I was able to complete the upgrade.


However the system still freezes when I try to start KDM/X, either via
	telinit 5
or
	/etc/init.d/kdm start

I was using a different X server (from Xaccel from Xi incorporated) but it was previously
working fine.

If I run the X server on its own, by just typing 'X' on the command line, it
works fine and I can start a file manager or xterm manually.

However if I run 'kdm', 'gdm' or 'xdm' on the command line, the screen just goes blank
and the system seems to freeze.

When in the stuck mode, ps just shows the following new processes:
 3300 ?        Ds     0:00 xdm
 3318 ?        D      0:00 xdm

They seem to be stuck in a disk sleep writing to /var/log/xdm.log, and any other
process that tries to access /var (a separate filesytem) also gets stuck and
cannot be interrupted, even by a 'kill -9'. 

The only way to recover seems to be a hard reset.

As a final clue, it works fine if I switch back to XFree86, or switch to
a 2.4 kernel, then the problem goes away.

Any ideas? What would xdm etc be doing that causes the /var filesystem to lockup,
when the X server executed directly is ok, and used to work fine with xdm before
the update ???

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                          digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com



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