Gdm hangs after boot

Ask Fedora
1

I have a strange one here, that has exhausted my meager knowledge of linux

Here is the chain of events

  1. Reboot
  2. Login comes up. I try and login and the display freezes
  3. Alt-Ctrl-F4 to bring up tty terminal. I login
  4. Systemctl restart gdm
  5. If I try to immediately try to login, it just keeps loops back to asking me to login
  6. If after the restart I give the system a minute or so, then I can login.

I have no idea what to do, or even what logs to add or post. Can someone provide some guidance?

2

Disable wayland and use X11. See /etc/gdm/custom.conf and modify it accordingly.

3

I can think some choices to solve this issue:

A. I think you can see 3 kernel versions on the GRUB before seeing the GDM login page. You can select and try old kernel.

B. You can go to tty terminal, then try $ sudo dnf upgrade gdm to check if you can install the latest version, and reboot.

C. You can try not to use GDM. Then run your window manager directly. This article on my blog may be helpful.
In my case, I am using mainly window manager sway and i3.

In the case of sway (Wayland-based window manager), run the command below on the console.

$ sway

In the case of the i3 (X-Window system-based window manager), I set the config below. Then run startx on the console to run the i3.

$ cat ~/.xinitrc
xrdb ~/.Xresources

# dbus-launch for Slack on Flatpak.
# https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/2754
eval "$(dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session)"

exec i3

If you still want to use the login page, maybe you can use the LightDM instead of GDM.

4
  1. Is this a fresh install of Fedora Workstation or did the problem occur after an update/upgrade?
  2. Does the problem occur from a power off reboot?
  3. Problems like this are often hardware dependent, so you should provide details, including the graphics card and driver.

journalctl -b is the first place to look for error messages, but it is very wordy. Chances are you are not the first to experience the problem, so searching for issues with a similar history and hardware may be the fastest path to understanding why this happens.

5

George, this was an update to Fedora 37
The problem occurs after a power off reboot, or a power on reboot
The graphics card is the built in HDMI port on a B450M-A II MB amdgpu driver

I will check the hardware settings

6

Eureka!

I finally stumbled across this little tidbit:

~/.local/share/gnome-shell (renaming it to gnome-shell.bak fixed the login for me)

I did the rename and viola, it worked.

7

This might have been overkill. Something in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ could be the real culprit, and you might miss some of the extensions. You could look for bug reports against the extensions in gnome-shell.bak or enable them one-by-one until things break (and file a bug report).