Flatpak install/update fails with "Need more input" or "Input buffer too small"

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Problem

When installing or updating flatpaks on Fedora 38, you might see an error like this one:

Error: ... Writing content object: Need more input

or this one:

Error: ... Input buffer too small

It might only happen for some flatpaks and not others (it seems to affect the larger ones), so your app might be just partially installed/updated.

Cause

There was a regression between flatpak and ostree, once ostree-2023.4-1.fc38 update was pushed into stable Fedora updates.

Related Issues

Solution

Please see this post.

Workarounds

It might take a day or two after publishing the fixed update before it is available for you to install. If you need a temporary workaround before the fix is available, you can use one of these below:

Option A) Sudo or --user

The problem shouldn’t appear if you run the flatpak command (assuming you’re running it from a terminal) with sudo. Alternatively you can also run it with the --user flatpak option, but please note this installs flatpaks for the current user only and can’t be used to update system flatpaks.

Option B) Downgrade ostree

Another workaround is to downgrade to an older ostree:

sudo dnf downgrade ostree

(this should also downgrade ostree-libs)

The broken version is ostree-2023.4-1.fc38, dnf should offer you something older.

When using immutable systems (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sericea), you can downgrade individual system packages with overrides, like this:

rpm-ostree override replace 'https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-cab8a89753'

When this issue is eventually solved and the fix is in a new version of your immutable OS, you can reset your overrides with:

rpm-ostree override reset -a

You can discuss this issue here.

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11 posts were merged into an existing topic: Talk: Flatpak install/update fails with “Need more input” or “Input buffer too small”

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An update has been released to fix this issue.

After you update your system in your usual way (and possibly reboot), you should no longer be affected by this problem. If the problem persists, please start a new discussion topic and we’ll help figure out what’s still wrong.

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