No upgrade executed when doing system-upgrade reboot

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1

Hello everyone,

It’s been a few month since I am trying to upgrade my old fedora-31 to the latest fedora. I have followed this documentation:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-upgrade/

Here is a summary of my commands on my system and all those commands finished successfully:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=32

This is the end of the output of the second command:

Total 4.2 MB/s | 102 MB 00:24
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded.
Complete!
Download complete! Use ‘dnf system-upgrade reboot’ to start the upgrade.

Then I have restarted the system as mentioned:

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

The following is then happening:

  1. The computer restart
  2. The Fedora logo is displayed for a few seconds
  3. The computer restart again
  4. The Fedora logo is again displayed
  5. Login prompt, but I am still in Fedora 31

I have made some research and I’ve found this topic on this discourse, but nothing on it helped:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/dnf-system-upgrade-fails-to-change-anything/77454/7

Somewhere else, I also discovered the systemd unit dnf-system-upgrade.service which I believe is started when a upgrade is supposed to be executed.
I have found some weird errors in the output:

sudo journalctl -xeu dnf-system-upgrade.service
[...]
Sep 16 11:37:59 my-hostname systemd[1096]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Failed to execute command: Permission denied
Sep 16 11:37:59 my-hostname systemd[1096]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/bin/dnf: Permission denied
[...]

Search this error did not yield any good results.

Could anyone help me dig this one further?
Thanks

2

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/upgrade-issue-fedora-31-to-32/58408/11?u=vgaetera

3

Thank you for the link, I have tried what was suggested, and I am still in Fedora 31, and there are no logs:

$ sudo dnf system-upgrade log                     
The following boots appear to contain upgrade logs:
-- no logs were found --

and dnf-upgrade-service is still in error:

Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1]: Starting System Upgrade using DNF…
Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1011]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Failed to execute command: Permission denied
Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1011]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/bin/dnf: Permission denied
Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=203/EXEC
Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.
Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1]: Failed to start System Upgrade using DNF.
Sep 27 09:58:33 my-hostname systemd[1]: dnf-system-upgrade.service: Triggering OnFailure= dependencies.

1 Like
4

Try switching SELinux to permissive mode:

# Permissive mode
sudo sed -i -r -e "s/^(SELINUX=).*$/\1permissive/" /etc/selinux/config
sudo setenforce 0

# Enforcing mode
sudo sed -i -r -e "s/^(SELINUX=).*$/\1enforcing/" /etc/selinux/config
sudo setenforce 1
2 Likes
5

After changing the SELinux mode, rebooting and…

$ cat /etc/fedora-release 
Fedora release 32 (Thirty Two)

For completeness, I have redone a download before rebooting:

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=32

Thank you very much :slight_smile:

6

While that seems to have worked, I wonder why you are staying 2 full versions behind the one (F34) that is being replaced in a couple months. F32 is past EOL and no longer getting support. The same will be true of F33 when F35 is released.

7

The documentation mention this:

System upgrade is only officially supported and tested over 2 releases at most (e.g. from 32 to 34 ). If you need to upgrade over more releases, it is recommended to do it in several smaller steps (read more).

As I had already troubles doing the first upgrade, I decided doing one upgrade at the time until my system is back to a supported version. It also allows me to check if everything seems to be working before going to the next release.