Bug#1040297: gnome: Gnome fails to start on login and falls back to GDM3

[Bastian Venthur]

Hi Simon,

thank you for the fast reply!

Am 04.07.23 um 16:21 schrieb Simon McVittie:
> On Tue, 04 Jul 2023 at 08:55:38 +0200, Bastian Venthur wrote:
>> Jul 03 16:48:14 fiona gnome-shell[2112]: ../../../glib/gmem.c:136: failed to allocate 51540049304 bytes
>> Jul 03 16:48:14 fiona kernel: __vm_enough_memory: pid: 2112, comm: gnome-shell, not enough memory for the allocation
> 
> I think this is the key thing here: some upgraded package has caused
> gnome-shell to try (and fail) to allocate 51G of RAM at once. The rest
> of what you quoted is just fallout from this.

Agreed.

>> Since there was no upgrade in Gnome recently, I suspect that one of the
>> dependencies got an upgrade. I do vaguely remember evolution, systemd and libc6
>> being the biggest updates today.
> 
> Please check /var/log/apt for recent upgrades. Mesa is another possibility,
> and if you have any GNOME Shell extensions installed/enabled, so are those.

I don´t have any shell extensions enabled.

> It would be useful to know whether a different user account on the
> same system shows the same issue (create a new one with adduser from a
> text-mode login if necessary) - that would narrow down whether this is
> triggered by some user-specific setting or whether it's a system-wide
> issue. gnome-shell is clearly not *completely* unusable on your system,
> because you say gdm3 is working, and the gdm3 UI is just gnome-shell in
> a special mode - but that special mode turns off a lot of code paths,
> including the whole application chooser, which seems to be involved in
> the crash.

Done. I've created a new user and tried to login, with the same results.

> If you can get a core dump/backtrace from the crash (the syslog entries
> that you quoted include a Javascript-level backtrace, but not a C-level
> one) then that would probably also be useful information. Installing
> system-coredump and using `coredumpctl gdb` is usually the easiest way
> to get that, especially for components larger than a single application.

I can try that, do you have a link with some tutorial on how to do that?


Cheers,

Bastian


-- 
Dr. Bastian Venthur                                 https://venthur.de
Debian Developer                                 venthur at debian org