Comments on GUI apps stop working until next boot after some system upgrades
Parent
GUI apps stop working until next boot after some system upgrades
My system occasionally has an issue that looks like this:
- I run
pacman -Syu - Many things get updated
- Many GUI apps (including all display managers and Xorg) start refusing to run and throw up OpenGL errors, if I try to restart the display manager I get stuck in TTY with no GUI
- At next reboot the problem goes away
I poked around and found some errors mentioning Nvidia and NVRM. I tried to reload the Nvidia kernel modules and that failed. I analyzed the error messages, and I'm pretty that what's happening is this:
- System upgrade installs new versions of kernel modules, deletes old ones
- New version is only compatible with new kernel
- That's okay, system upgrade installed the new kernel version as well, and even ran mkinitcpio via pacman hooks
- But the old kernel is still running in memory, and it's not compatible with the new kernel modules, therefore it's not able to load them - and rebooting fixes this by booting me into the new kernel
I'm not 100% sure but it sounds plausible. However, it is annoying to have to reboot after the system upgrade. On the other hand, the situation seems hopeless because how can I reload the kernel without a reboot?
Is there anything I can do here, or is this basically Nvidia devs creating a situation where rebooting is mandatory after a system upgrade that touches drivers?
Post
Typically it is recommended to reboot your machine after a kernel update (because of the issues you mentioned).
If you really do not want to reboot, there is a workaround by means of the kexec system call.
I have never tried it myself, but after installing the kexec-tools package, you should be able to load the updated kernel as follows:
# systemctl kexec
This practically reboots the system but skips any hardware or firmware checks (and possibly some other early boot processes).
Edit: as pointed out by dsr in the comments: you probably want to check out the troubleshooting section to make things work neatly with Nvidia drivers.
0 comment threads