Talk: GDM crashes after upgrade to Fedora 43 due to authselect migration

Ask Fedora
7

Hello everyone,

I just registered and came here to say that I experienced the issue when upgrading from F41->F43 (a bit late I know :wink:).
In my case, the issue was compounded by the fact that:

  • the root account is locked by default, hence a non-graphical boot + emergency prompt that is non-functional :sob:
  • I then attempted to restore the root account
    • the official doc instructions seem outdated: after changing the root account password and rebooting, the new password would not be accepted (‘invalid password’) at the next system boot.
    • more searches brought in potential SELinux issues but despite following these steps to reset the root password, they did not work either (same ‘invalid password’ error).
  • furthermore, after these steps, I found and followed your workaround to boot into multi-user, non-graphical system but this time, the password for my normal user would not be accepted (again 'invalid password)
  • at this point, I was about to resort to reinstalling while keeping my home directory but found that the installer would error out because of my /boot partition being too small.
    • I have indeed been updating my system from at least F33 from I see in my notes (probably earlier) so I have a 500 MiB /boot partition (it looks like I could probably have used the ‘mount point assignment’ option instead though).
  • after much searching, I realized the issue came from the previous steps touching /etc/shadow but not properly relabeling it SELinux-wise. After calling restorecon on the file, my local user password was enventually accepted at the next boot and I could use the workaround to fix the authselect issue.

So thank you for documenting the issue and its workaround :folded_hands: ! It looks like I have some maintenance tasks on my side to adjust to the new system requirements after system-upgrade’ing for so long :slightly_smiling_face: but this was quite distressful. Hopefully, others can find this post too and this is useful :crossed_fingers: