How I fixed my problem of my monitor beeing locked at 800x600 resolution after F44 update

Ask Fedora
1

Problem

After an update F43 → F44 my fedora system had an issue where it would only have a resolution of 800x600. no change possible. it also decided to not show the gdm launcher anymore, but log me into some form of emergency gdm session.

Note: I know the following is not a complete fix. something is going wrong with systemd or other components and I don’t know what (other than it beeing systemd). This is for posterity, maybe someone can complete the picture what is going on here.

This is on an AMD system (CPU and (i)GPU).

Cause

The root cause is not yet known.

Related Issues

similar to Fedora 44 Messed up/locked monitor's resolution and other settings

… but without nvidia hardware.

Workarounds

So I had 2 problems. The above mentioned case where gdm would spawn some emergency gdm session with a home in /run/gdm/home/

I solved this by editing /usr/share/gdm/greeter/wayland-sessions/gnome-greeter.desktop and putting Exec=gnome-session --session=gnome-login into the file - gleaned from here: Gdm-greeter - Unable to log in with GDM after recent updates - GNOME - Manjaro Linux Forum - this probably wont hold, but I needed a solution that works now.

Fixing the second issue was

  1. Finding installed nvidia / nouveau software/firmware and uninstalling it

I did it via dnf: dnf list installed |grep nvidia and others and removing them with sudo dnf remove *nvidia* - etc.

then I ran just to make sure I was up-to-date:

sudo dnf distro-sync --refresh --releasever=44 --setopt=protected_packages=“”

  • which installed some mesa packages. be aware that this command disables system level protections.

after that I could restart and login to my account. Still had the issue with resolution beeing locked to 800x600.

Then I reinstalled grub

sudo dnf reinstall grub2-common grub2-efi grub2-efi-modules shim-*

sudo mv /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.broken
sudo mv /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg.broken

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

This is a bit of my weird startup config. Normally you just need to touch /boot/grub2/grub.cfg - but for my system that wasn’t enough.

Then I regenerated the startup images

sudo dracut -f --regenerate-all

sync, reboot - that was it, that fixed my issues.

3

I moved this to Ask Fedora so it has better visibility. But if people can narrow down the problem more (ideally reproduce it on some hardware), find the regressions (mesa, kernel, etc) and provide a narrower fix, it can be a candidate for documenting in Ask Fedora > Common Issues . Thanks.

4

Thank you. I was unsure how common this is. If anyone has / had similar problems, I’m here to compare notes.

5

This will break your updates permanently when replacing the /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg file that way. The system will now never see any new kernel updates.

Recovery is simple and must be done unless you intend to repeat the
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg command every time there is a kernel upgrade

sudo rm /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
sudo dnf reinstall grub2-common

The file /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg is a pointer file that was created when the system was installed and must never be altered. It redirects grub to the real grub.cfg file. The real grub.cfg file is the one located at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg and is the only one altered when kernels are upgraded.

Check the values of the links under /etc to see that the above is correct.
ls -l /etc/grub2*

This command, as given, will remove the nvidia-gpu-firmware package which will also break the ability for the system to load the nouveau driver when the nvidia driver is not available. If you ran that as written then please reinstall the nvidia-gpu-firmware package.

6

You are absolutely right. I should have been more specific than “my weird boot setup”.

For some reason links wont work in my EFI directory, that’s why I had to do this.

And yes normally one should not have to do this, as you can see I was in a bit of a hurry and just fixing it by hand instead of debugging weird fs-issues was faster.

I also left out: I have a separate encrypted home partition with a key in /etc/luks-keys/home_secret_key that fails to decrypt randomly. But I do not think that has a connection to the graphics issue at hand. Again “my weird boot setup” doing a lot of heavy lifting I realize now.

This command, as given, will remove the nvidia-gpu-firmware package which will also break the ability for the system to load the nouveau driver when the nvidia driver is not available. If you ran that as written then please reinstall the nvidia-gpu-firmware package.

That was intentional. I only have amd cpu and gpu on this system, and I do not want to have any nvidia drivers (kinda the opposite of the person I linked to).

  • any idea which nvidia package I can install to check if if the problem returns?
7

Do you mean symlinks? A standard Fedora install doesn’t use symlinks in the EFI directory. /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg is a normal file, with a very simple config that tells GRUB to look in the boot partition for the main config. For example:

search --no-floppy --root-dev-only --fs-uuid --set=dev 4fcd507f-af2b-4574-a8d4-4ade52070c32
set prefix=($dev)/grub2
export $prefix
configfile $prefix/grub.cfg

The long ID in the first line is the UUID of the boot partition’s filesystem.

Try reinstalling nvidia-gpu-firmware.

8

Yup, thats it. graphics issue returned (I was only able to select one 800x600 resolution). uninstalling the package made the issue not go away.

reinstalling grub packages like above + sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg made the issue go away.

9

Wow, this is a puzzle! Normally the nvidia-gpu-firmware just lives harmlessly on systems without Nvidia hardware.

If you compare your “good” grub.cfg with the grub.cfg.broken that you made, do you see any relevant differences?

10

Weirdly not on my first try (there was an additional empty line on line 278 in grub.cfg, nothing that should be relevant). I made snapshots of different situations from the whole boot folder and various installs/uninstalls and will report back tomorrow if time permits.

current situation is:

nvidia-gpu-firmware is installed, I did purposefully not grub2-mkconfig and the resolution problem was fixed with sudo dnf reinstall grub2-efi-modules ‘shim-*’ - I didn’t have time to track it down further - weirdness all around.

Edit (next day): after startup today (this would be the second reboot) the resolution was fixed again. removing nvidia-gpu-firmware and reinstalling grub efi modules and shims like above fixed it again. Let’s see how this holds up.