Fedora 30->31 upgrade fail

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1

Hi all, new user here and Fedora noob, so I probably haven’t heard the basic guidance you’re about to give me already.

I have a Dell XPS 9570 with Fedora 30 installed. I installed all the regular updates through the Software app, and then hit the prominent Upgrade button for Fedora 31, also in the Software app. It downloaded some packages, did a restart, and now after a slow boot I’m stuck with an empty screen save for a _ in the top left corner.

Based on another post I saw, my theory is it’s related to NVidia drivers misbehaving, but that same post said to use Ctrl-Alt-F3 to bring up the terminal in order to fix it, however this does nothing on my machine. (Ctrl-Alt-Fn-F3 also does nothing). I tried all the Function keys.

The grub menu has an option for a Fedora 30 rescue mode, but this fails due to “Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked.”

Any tips would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Max

2

how far c.q. long did your upgrade go?, I would not expect a Fedora 30 rescue mode, but a Fedora 31 rescue mode in grub

My suggestion would be to retry a clean install from a bootable DVD or usb
good luck,
Paul

3

Hi @nanodeath welcome to community.

Maybe this post help you with the issue, look if it fix to you.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/howto-cannot-open-access-to-console-the-root-account-is-locked-in-emergency-mode-dracut-emergency-shell/2010

Regards

4

Alright the “Restoring bootloader” page you indirectly linked was a bit out of date re: root partition names, but i figured it out and am able to boot as root now via the Fedora 30 recovery mode. I’m now picking apart logs in journalctl and the only one that stands out so far is

abrt-server]1386]: Oops looks like a problem in kernel module, new component xorg-x11-drv-nouveau
...<no backtrace>
abrt-notification[1404]: System encountered a non-fatal error in ??()

Network also won’t connect, and the directions for reinstalling nvidia modules here don’t help me because I don’t have nvidia-installer.

I’ll keep investigating.

1 Like
5

Still trying to blacklist the nouveau driver – I get kernel: nouveau ... tmr: stalled at fffffffffffffffffff-type errors a lot still, in addition to the previous ones.

I also see

Failed to start GNOME Shell on Wayland.
Dependency failed for GNOME Shell on Wayland.
Dependency failed for GNOME Wayland Session.
Dependency failed for GNOME Wayland Session (session: gnome-login)

Hard to tell why, but it’s preceded by a lot of orange text with periodic references to that nouveau thing.

Unrelated, but I also see

Mounting /boot/efi...
mount: /boot/efi: unknown filesystem type 'vfat'
boot-efi.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited, status=32/n/a
...
Failed to mount /boot/efi.
...
Dependency failed for Mark the need to relabel after reboot.
6

Can you post the output of this commands?

cat /proc/cmdline

lsmod | grep -i -e{nouveau,nvidia}

7 
$ cat /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=(hd1,gpt10)/vmlinuz-0-rescue-<<hex>> root=/dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root ro resume=/dev/mapper/fedora-swap rd.lvm.lv=fedora_localhost-live/root rd.lvm.lv=fedora/swap rd.lvm.lv=fedora_localhost-live/swap rhgb quiet

$ lsmod | grep -i -e{nouveau,nvidia}

nouveau         2207744 0
i2c_algo_bit      16384 2 i915,nouveau
drm_kms_helper   208896 2 i915,nouveau
ttm              114688 1 nouveau
drm              495616 5 drm_kms_helper,i915,ttm,nouveau
mxm_wmi           16384 1 nouveau
wmi               32768 2 mxm_wmi,nouveau
video             49152 2 i915,nouveau

Also I do have SELinux installed, but I’m not sure what the enforcement level was set as. I’ve set it to permissive now.

8

Did you install nvidia driver from someplace, Do you have a nvidia card?

Post the output of this command too:

ls /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/

9

/lib/modules/$(uname -r) doesn’t exist because of the Fedora 30 recovery mode I’m in, but GRUB has the 31 kernel as 5.3.11-300-fc31.x86_64, so if I get

$ ls /lib/modules/5.3.11-300.fc31.x86_64/drivers/gpu/drm/
amd ast bochs bridge cirrus drm_kms_helper.ko.xz drm.ko.xz drm_vram_helper.ko.xz gma 500 i2c i915 mgag200 nouveau qxl radeon scheduler ttm udl vboxvideo vgem virtio vmwgfx

In the nouveau directory is a 622kb file nouveau.ko.xz.

10

When you restart, do you go direct to emergency console right? if so we can try regenerate bootloader

If you have EFI install sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and after reboot

if you have Bios sudo grub2-install /dev/sdX where X = letter of dev where boot is placed

11

I do have GRUB working and it looks like this:

Fedora (<kernel>) 31 (Thirty One)
Fedora (<kernel>) 30 (Thirty)
...two more Fedora 30 entries for older kernels...
Fedora (0-rescue-<hash>) 30 (Thirty)
Windows Boot Manager
System setup

If I choose the first entry, after 5 minutes I land on the _ screen. I’ve been using the 0-rescue entry to get to the emergency console.

I’ll regenerate the bootloader anyway.

1 Like
12

Ok , also do you go in blank screen if you select one of the others 2 entries of fedora 30?

13

I followed the EFI instructions, and…I didn’t have a /boot/grub2/grub.cfg file before, and the GRUB menu looks the same as it did before.

14

post these 2 commands

lsblk -f

ls /boot

what do say this outpu?

ls /sys/firmware/efi

15 
# lsblk -f

nvme0n1
|- nvme0n1p1 vfat ESP <UUID>
|- <bunch of Windows crap>
|- <bunch of Dell crap>
|- nvme0n1p9 LVM2_member <UUID>
   |- fedora-swap swap <UUID>
|- nvme0n1p10 ext4 <UUID> 657M 26% /boot
|- nvme0n1p11 LVM2_member <UUID>
   |- fedora_localhost--live-root ext4 <UUID> 3.7G 79% /
   |- fedora_localhost--live-swap swap <UUID> [SWAP]

# ls /boot

config-<kernel>
efi (dir)
elf-memtest86+-5.01
extlinux (dir)
grub2 (dir)
initramfs-0-rescue-<hash>.img
initramfs-<kernel>.img
loader (dir)
lost+found (dir)
membtest86++-5.01
System.map-<kernel>
vmlinuz-0-rescue-<hash>
vmlinuz-<kernel>

where is one of 4 different kernels, including 5.3.11-300.fc31.x86_64.

# ls /sys/firmware/efi/
config_table
efivars (dir)
esrt (dir)
fw_platform_size
fw_vendor
runtime
runtime-map (dir)
systab
16

Did you install the nvidia driver when you had fedora 30 and after did you update to fedora 31 right?

If you did, did you install this thought rpmfusion?

output of

ls /lib/modules/5.3.11-300.fc31.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm i

EDit: you did post it before

sorry than i didn’t notice, i don’t see nvidia so looks like you don’t have it. Not idea that is going on, I should imagine this problem with the nvidia driver and blocking start but looks like you didn’t install it.

If you have additional information than can help try post here so than others with more experience than me can help you.

17

Not sure – probably. Or if there was a checkbox for it in the Fedora 30 installer, I would have checked it.

Fedora was the only distro besides Ubuntu that would work out-of-the-box with the XPS 9570, due to graphics issues; ironic that it’s now having trouble upgrading due to graphics issues.

I think if I hadn’t used LVM it’d be a lot easier just to reinstall at this point, but…oh well.

I’ll see about installing the driver.

18

You can check it with

dnf info --installed *nvidia*

if nothing is showed probably you never did it. I would recommend you start a live fedora31 session before to see if the live session run out of problems. If it does maybe should be good do a fresh install of fedora31 and after install the driver of nvidia if you do need it but if nouveau works and it is enough to you, stay with nouveau.

If in some moment you wish install the nvidia driver you need know the model of your GPU and see if it is supported all can be find here:

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

You will need special attention to disable secure boot in these case.

Once you did take a decision of nvidia driver ask here for support if you have doubts of it.

Let’s also wait for advice from others mates in the forum, maybe they can find another solutions and so avoid reinstall.

I hope we can find a good solution for you, because fedora is an awesome OS and sure it willl do work.

Regards

19

Thanks for your help so far, @xtym. Even though we haven’t arrived at a solution yet I appreciate you taking the time to look into this as much as you have.

And yeah, that dnf command suggests that I actually hadn’t installed the Nvidia drivers.

Secure boot is/was disabled in BIOS.

I can boot just fine with the Fedora 31 LiveUSB.

1 Like
20

hit the prominent Upgrade button for Fedora 31, also in the Software app. It downloaded some packages

That is not the kind of job I have the blind faith to do from a GUI “app”. I want console output and I want line by line control of what commands are begin done. As you have noted with LVM, the more levels of abstraction there are, the less control you have and the deeper and more painful your problems are when something goes wrong.

I long for the days of grub-1.97 when you could still just edit one line in a text file and sort out any problems or modify your boot process. Now it’s all just en ephemeral , virtual mess.

I’ve spent about 8h on the phone today trying to sort someone out on a Fed29 which needs up grading. Grub2 is a mess. God help us when BLS gets forced down our throats too. I may even quit Fedora before that happens.

Last time I got in jam using dnf upgrade-plugin which failed to do the upgrade and took me a month to understand why not. I got out of it by using dnf directly ;

dnf distro-sync --releasever=31

Fedora is keen to push Wayland but it’s far from finished, unless you want to be a lab rat you may wish to avoid it. I hate reinstalling from zero but the pain may be less that the time you will waste sorting this out and would offer the choice of avoiding Wayland and LVM .

I’ve been very satisfied with Fedora since I installed at Fed23, but in the last 6mo, it’s caused me far too much wasted time. If I get to the point of clean install I would seriously be looking elsewhere.

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