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.”
Alright the “Restoring bootloader” page you indirectly linked was a bit out of date re: root partition names, but i figured it out and am able to boot as root now via the Fedora 30 recovery mode.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.
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.
/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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.