Bug Impact Update: Catastrophic Display Server Crashes & Workspace Wipes
Following up on my previous comments regarding the rare recurrences and Nathan's attempt to recreate this in comment #18. A new, suspected-related/derivative bug has manifested twice over the last 30 days on my end, but with a highly disruptive behavior: it isn't triggering a full hardware reboot, but rather a catastrophic graphical display server crash that forcibly kicks me out to the login screen and obliterates my active workspace session. To answer Nathan's reproduction questions: this does not happen with a simple single-package downgrade or install. It requires a heavy multitasking stack and specific idle states to trip. Incident 1 (August 16): I left the machine entirely idle to run errands for several hours. While away, background updates ran and/or pending updates existed. journalctl shows that at 7:31:39 AM, the graphical session completely imploded under the hood. When I returned at 4:36 PM (16:36:31), I was greeted by a fresh login screen and a completely wiped workspace. Incident 2 (August 31): I was running Chrome, Brave (installed as a snap per comment #21), gedit, Writer, and a VirtualBox Win10 VM. Immediately after executing a file-save operation inside the VM (saving a compressed 3D slicing .gcode.3mf file), I stepped away for a restroom break. At 11:11:29 AM, the exact same crash triggered, kicking me back to the login screen by the time I returned at 11:16 AM. In both instances, running uptime reveals the system has been up continuously for 28+ days—proving the core Linux kernel did not power- cycle or reboot. Instead, journalctl error logs for the desktop environment show a catastrophic display server crash tracking exactly to those timestamps: Aug 16 07:31:39 intern gdm3[2211]: Gdm: on_display_added: assertion 'GDM_IS_REMOTE_DISPLAY (display)' failed Aug 16 07:31:39 intern gdm3[2211]: Gdm: on_display_removed: assertion 'GDM_IS_REMOTE_DISPLAY (display)' failed ... Aug 31 11:11:29 intern gdm3[2211]: Gdm: on_display_added: assertion 'GDM_IS_REMOTE_DISPLAY (display)' failed Aug 31 11:11:29 intern gdm3[2211]: Gdm: on_display_removed: assertion 'GDM_IS_REMOTE_DISPLAY (display)' failed The graphical session (GNOME Shell/Wayland) completely crashed, instantly terminating all open user processes and wiping out unsaved data in editors, browsers, and active virtual machines. Immediately after signing back in post-incident 2, a massive flood of pending updates arrived that had been silently bottlenecked behind an invisible reboot flag. There appears to be an active "ghost lock state" happening here. Because update-manager fails to properly release its sleep/shutdown inhibitors when background updates are pending, it corrupts the desktop power management layer. When the system hits its however-many-second idle delay, the desynchronization between the locked power hooks, the desktop idle state, and active virtualization workloads causes a fatal display server crash instead of a clean screen-blanking. This issue needs its importance escalated from "Low." This is no longer just an annoying power-consumption or screen-wear bug; the interaction between the unreleased inhibitor and active user workloads is actively causing desktop session terminations and data loss on a production LTS release (24.04, to preclude scrolling up). -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2148306 Title: Idle inhibition persists when updates are pending, preventing screen blanking To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/2148306/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
