Gnome apps cause WM to fail on Fedora 40

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I downloaded and installed Fedora 40 Workstation from an USB drive onto a Dell Precision Tower 7810 and rebooted w/o a problem. I then opened a terminal window in the desktop and ran ‘sudo dnf update’. The rather massive (1.3 GB) update apparently finished without a problem. However after rebooting while I can log in and get to the desk top, if I try to run any application, say the terminal window again or a browser, the screen goes back to the log in screen. I have been through the install/update sequence multiple times. Any hints of where to look for the problem?

2

Sounds like: 2292321 – gnome shell wayland sessions crash when any app is launched

Try dnf downgrade mesa*

Then reboot and see if that resolves the issue. With KDE, using SDDM you get a black screen. Hopefully, they’ll get this resolved soon and pushed to stable.

If that is indeed your issue, you’ll need to stop updating until it’s fixed or place an
excludepkgs=mesa* in your dnf repo files.

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3

Another reason why a gnome session may die like that is when you are running out of RAM and the systemd-oom kills the entire session slice.

4

Gerald B Cox–downgrading mesa and rebooting seems to have fixed the problem. Thank you!

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Depending on your graphics card, mine is:

[AMD/ATI] Pitcairn PRO [Radeon HD 7850 / R7 265 / R9 270 1024SP]

you can switch from radeon to amdgpu and avoid the issue.

It appears from other discussions on the
web that some older radeon cards are indeed supported by amdgpu.

You can test if it works for you by simply editing the kernel command line at boot and adding:

radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1

for south island cards support and

radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1

for caribbean cards.

If it doesn’t successfully boot, you can stick with the downgrade procedure.

Which is which?
If your card uses a caribbean island name it is a caribbean card, south pacific
are south island cards.

I would recommend you do a web search on: amdgpu radeon kernel or reading:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU
if you aren’t sure.

You can then issue the lspci -k command and should see the amdgpu driver in use. Once I saw this I upgraded mesa, and all was fine.

lspci -k | grep -A 3 -E "(VGA|3D)"
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Pitcairn PRO [Radeon HD 7850 / R7 265 / R9 270 1024SP]
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Radeon HD 7850
        Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
        Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu

To make the change permanent:
For south island cards:

sudo grubby --args=radeon.si_support=0 --update-kernel=ALL
sudo grubby --args=amdgpu.si_support=1 --update-kernel=ALL

For caribbean cards:

sudo grubby --args=radeon.cik_support=0 --update-kernel=ALL
sudo grubby --args=amdgpu.cik_support=1 --update-kernel=ALL

then reboot.

6

@Gerald B dnf downgrade mesa* and rebooting fixed the problem. wayland is running again. I put excludepkgs=mesa* in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf … I will wait for the update of mesa*
Thanks a lot

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