On Fri, 13 Jul 2012, Pat Riehecky wrote:
There have been a number of questions regarding problem with starting X after
the recent security update. This email is an attempt to summarize the
situation, provide insight, demonstrate the process as a whole, and clear up
some confusion with the solution.
Cause:
At the root of the problem was the security update for xorg-x11-server
published on July 9th. The problem was caused by a change in the module ABI
for loading xorg drivers that happened in SL6.2. That change was a bugfix
and not a security update, so it was not pushed out to earlier releases. The
security update for xorg-x11-server uses the new ABI. The package, however,
does not force the use of these newer drivers though any rpm dependency tools
- such as requires, conflicts, or obsoletes. Thus the xorg-x11-drv update can
be installed without incident, even though it will not work as expected. Our
usual dependency resolution process is unable to locate and report
dependencies that are not listed by the package. The change in the ABI
happened with SL6.2, but none of the xorg packages were security errata at
that time. So, we didn't catch the problem then as we didn't have to
integrate the 6.2 ABI with the 6.1 ABI.
On the period in testing:
The xorg-x11-server package was in the sl-testing repository for 12 days
before the date of release.
I received a few reports from people who tested the packages while they were
in testing. It appears that those testers were on 6.2 and thus didn't run
into the incompatibility problem. There were no problems reported with this
package during the testing window.
In that case I may have a different problem.
My two test machines which failed were running 6.2 with (to the best
of my knowledge) all updates. They may have been updated from earlier
6.1 releases, but both have had sl-release-6.2-1.1 at least since May.
I guess that my problems are slightly different from others as
I can't get a console or ssh connection to the broken machines,
but others seem to be able to.
I now regret not posting a "my machine wont boot with the 6.3
security updates in testing for 6.2" without any useful information
about what or why, but until I had time to boot from a Live-DVD
I had no way of communicating with the machine.
Sorry if I'm a bit short, but in spite of probably a day's
work on this my laptop is still a brick.
--
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[email protected] http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna
