Upgrade forensics

Ask Fedora
1

I’m attempting to upgrade a system to F40 beta.
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40 in preparation for the upgrade completes and shows no transaction problems but when I do a sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot the upgrade fails.
I had to do this several till I caught the package that was causing problems. This is very time consuming since the transaction test takes tens of minutes.
Is there any detailed record kept of the upgrade that I can check to see what failed?
If I use sudo dnf system-upgrade log I just get one line of unhelpful information.

2

Look in the journal for all the logs for the system-upgrade.
Using journal -b -1 should get your the logs from the previous boot.
Change the -1 as needed to get to the boot that did the system-upgrade if was further in the past.

3

What package? What hardware?
Did you do the suggested dnf upgrade --refresh before beginning the download?
Did you try a dnf distro-sync --refresh to ensure everything matched?
Was it a package from a 3rd party repo?

4

FYI I just checked on my test VM what logs exist:
You can find the boot times with

$ journalctl --list-boots
IDX BOOT ID                          FIRST ENTRY                 LAST ENTRY
 -4 9b5971bdd3cb4a69a62a5b3d4c231028 Wed 2024-04-10 16:09:24 BST Wed 2024-04-10 16:32:08 BST
 -3 a5e2f58290a647e1abef0b936417eea2 Wed 2024-04-10 16:32:12 BST Wed 2024-04-10 16:40:24 BST
 -2 7defa37bc7da474bb8dbb997744810ad Wed 2024-04-10 16:40:29 BST Wed 2024-04-10 16:48:39 BST
 -1 9138771a758c4a858079f7aa556ad1db Wed 2024-04-10 16:49:55 BST Wed 2024-04-10 17:08:35 BST
  0 4da9b073600d44ff9d5e802900cc34ff Wed 2024-04-10 17:08:38 BST Fri 2024-04-12 17:17:53 BST

Then when you have the boot that did the system-upgrade this will pull out the logs:

$ journalctl -b -3 -u dnf-system-upgrade
2024-04-10T16:32:16+01:00 systemd[1]: Starting dnf-system-upgrade.service - System Upgrade using DNF...
2024-04-10T16:32:17+01:00 dnf-3[644]: Last metadata expiration check: 0:03:13 ago on Wed 10 Apr 2024 16:29:04 BST.
2024-04-10T16:32:17+01:00 python3[644]: Starting system upgrade. This will take a while.
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]: Dependencies resolved.
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]: ==================================================================================>
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]:  Package                                         Arch     Version                 >
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]: ==================================================================================>
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]: Installing:
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]:  kernel                                          aarch64  6.8.4-300.fc40          >
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]:  kernel-modules                                  aarch64  6.8.4-300.fc40          >
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]:  kernel-modules-extra                            aarch64  6.8.4-300.fc40          >
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]: Upgrading:
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]:  Box2D                                           aarch64  2.4.1-14.fc40           >
2024-04-10T16:32:20+01:00 dnf-3[644]:  ImageMagick                                     aarch64  1:7.1.1.26-5.fc40       >
1 Like
5

Great … I should have realized it would be in the journal!