bug#35509: Stopping gdm-service results in an unresponsive system

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi Timothy,

Timothy Sample <address@hidden> writes:

> I have a lead now!  At least, I have a way to stop GDM and return to a
> working TTY.  Assuming that you are working on a TTY with elogind
> session “c1”, you can run
>
>     herd stop xorg-server & (sleep 5; loginctl activate c1)
>
> When GDM exits, it leaves the display in a non-working state.  It turns
> out elogind knows how to fix this.  I’m guessing it does some magic with
> the VT_* set of ioctl requests (see “src/basic/terminal-util.c” from
> elogind).  I’m not sure how to get GDM to clean up after itself, though.
> It might be expecting things of elogind that it doesn’t provide (since
> it is not exactly like the original logind from systemd).

Thanks for investigating!

My first guess is that when GDM is killed, it's leaving the keyboard
in RAW mode.  Running "kbd_mode -a" might be another way to recover.
"Alt + SysRq + r" might be another way.  I'll try again after I finish
building my post-staging-merge system.

  https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO-9.html

I notice that in Debian's start script for gdm3, it runs activate_logind
just before launching GDM, where activate_logind is the following Bash
function:

  activate_logind() {
    # Try to dbus activate logind to avoid a race conditions if we are not
    # running systemd as PID1 and we have systemd << 204 package installed (see:
    # #747292)
    if [ ! -d /run/systemd/system ] && [ -x /lib/systemd/systemd-logind-launch 
]; then
      dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.DBus 
/org/freedesktop/DBus \
        org.freedesktop.DBus.StartServiceByName string:org.freedesktop.login1 
uint32:0 2>&1 > /dev/null
    fi
  }

The Debian start script is debian/gdm3.init in
<http://deb.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gdm3/gdm3_3.22.3-3+deb9u2.debian.tar.xz>.

The Debian bug referenced above is <https://bugs.debian.org/747292>.

Might be worth a try, but admittedly I'm grasping at straws here :)

       Mark