After today's update my machine is stuck on loading lightdm, no TTY access possible either

Support System Updates
1

Hi guys,

I ran today’s update (30.11.2024) on my laptop (Manjaro Xfce on Xorg) and left it updating. After some time I came back and stumbled upon the charger cable and my laptop fell to the floor.

I opened the screen lid and realized that the system is stuck in a loop when waking up from suspend: It shows a CLI cursor, then a mouse pointer on black background, then again the CLI cursor and so on.

I tried to switch to a TTY, but wasn’t able to. It showed the TTY login prompt for some fraction of a second and then returned to the loop again before I had a chance to type in a single letter.

I had to power off the laptop hard. After switching it on again, it was stuck in the same loop again though.

Booting one of the older kernel versions, it drops me into the emergency shell reporting that /boot/efi cannot be found.

In the emergency shell I can access log files, but couldn’t find anything suspicious so far. The journal and the Xorg log look good.

I suspected a hardware issue, so I tried to boot from a live USB drive. It successfully boots a live system. I can even chroot into the damaged installed system.

In chroot I tried to run pacman -Syu, thinking that the update hasn’t finished. Indeed there was a db.lck file present in the pacman directory. I removed it and ran pacman again. But it told me that all packages are up to date.

So eventually everything seems to be fine, but the machine is stuck in a loop which doesn’t even allow me to access the TTY.

I fear that there is some software or hardware issue with my SSD, which would explain why the installed system fails to boot properly, while the live system boots okay. Is there any place where I could look besides of journalctl and Xorg.0.log?

I’ll chroot again and save those logs, if they are necessary, but possibly this is a known problem (which I was to dumb to find using the search) which is easy to solve?

Thanks for any input!
Photon

2

It’s a coredump by the lightdm-gtk-greeter. How can I proceed?

Here is the log: Lightdm-Coredump - Pastebin.com

3

My first question would be …is timeshift installed? Try from your live usb.
Next, when it’s only a lightdm-greeter coredump, why are you not able to get around this with tty?

4

I disabled lightdm via systemd and could access the TTY now. This way I got the coredump from my previous post. But now I don’t know how to proceed. Is it possible to downgrade pam and see if this solves the issue, without touching other packages?

edit: Nevermind, downgrading pam made no difference…

5

your update got interupted, you need to chroot and fix it from there, you may have ‘exists in filesystem’ issues…
boot into manjaro live usb, make sure you are connected to internet, open terminal and chroot:
manjaro-chroot -a
(this command doesnt work with btrfs/ encryption)
rerun update:
pacman-mirrors -f 5 && pacman -Syyu
if there are errors post the output here, if there are no errors and you are up to date, post output from:
mhwd-kernel -li
ldconfig - (this should return nothing)

6

…again, is timeshift installed ???

7

Sorry, missed that one. Nope, no timeshift, unfortunately…

I’m up to date according to pacman update rerun.

mhwd-kernel -li returns that I’m using 6.11.10-2-MANJARO (linux611). Installed are linux611 and linux66.

ldconfig gives no output as expected.

8

are you chrooted?
if you are in tty, you need to run ldconfig with sudo:
sudo ldconfig

9

No, I’m in TTY of the installation in question. I ran it with sudo, indeed.

I also tried ldd /usr/bin/lightdm-gtk-greeter but everything looks good there either.

10

so reinstall the kernel:
sudo pacman -S linux611 linux66
if no errors, reboot

11

Already did that, actually twice :sweat_smile: Didn’t change anything regarding the coredump, unfortunately… There were no errors.

edit: Now I did it with linux66 as well, and it now boots without emergency shell. But the lightdm coredump is present in both 6.6 and 6.11…

12

i dont think its related to lightdm, looking at this:

reinstall grub, follow instruction here, and boot into live usb, so that you can provide full logs before reinstalling it:

logs from chroot:
journalctl -b-1 -p5 --no-pager

13

Indeed, this was before I reinstalled linux66. Now I reinstalled it as well and get the same issue with a lightdm coredump in both kernels.

14

i see… but still those logs are needed, also post output from:
pacman -Qm

15

Sure, let me chroot again, to get them! Thanks for your support, guys!

16

Stupid me, I grepped for lightdm and thus the stacktrace was not complete… But now it is completely included in the journal!

17

why do you have ibt off kernel parameter? you dont have nvidia, and its no longer needed anyway… and btw thats not related to your issue, only curious…

and you have a lot of foreign packages, didnt expect that… remove any from them related to anything graphical/visual, like themes, widgets etc…
also noticed these:
wxwidgets-common-3.0 3.0.5.1-2
wxwidgets-gtk3-3.0 3.0.5.1-2
these are also in official repos… so remove these and install them from official repos…
these also caught my eye:
xfce4-multiload-ng-plugin 1.5.2-2
xfce4-panel-compiz 4.18.6-1
maybe uninstalling them, could help…
also you have there some vpn related packages, those can also cause similar issues…

and python2, that is dead, so could also be a reason…

you can also reinstall lightdm related packages:
pacman -Qqn | grep lightdm | pacman -S -

EDIT:
also any package from the pacman Qm output that loads at startup, could be a reason…

EDIT2:
are those packages all up to date? that could also be a reason

18

But lightdm doesn’t even manage to display the login prompt. Any GUI application is only loaded after login, inside the user session. This applies to the Xfce packages and to the VPN stuff.

I tried reinstalling lightdm related packages, but it didn’t solve the issue… Looks like it is something else…

19

all the foreign packages up to date?
post also the pacman log from the update:
cat /var/log/pacman.log
and also full system info:
inxi -zav7

20

Yes. I removed v86d now, not sure what it is, looks like a package that has been in the official Manjaro repos but got dropped. No change though.

I will chroot to get the pacman log!