Re: [gentoo-user] Login manager occasionally fails to show

["Markus Gustafsson" <markus@gustafsson.io>]

Thanks for the input. I do indeed have a pretty new CPU as well.

I did try the rc.conf trick but no luck after trying it once. I'll keep it around for a while and see if I can see an overall improvement.

Regards,
Markus

On Sun, Jan 26, 2025, at 13:33, Michael wrote:
> On Sunday 26 January 2025 11:18:00 Greenwich Mean Time Peter Humphrey wrote:
>> On Saturday 25 January 2025 21:41:01 Greenwich Mean Time Markus Gustafsson
>> 
>> wrote:
>> > Hi!
>> > 
>> > I've been running in to a problem on and off for the past year or so: when
>> > I boot my computer it won't always show a login screen (SDDM). The screen
>> > will remain dark without a signal. If I swap tty with ctrl+alt+F1 it will
>> > show me the boot log, with the last entry being "starting local" and
>> > letting me login through the terminal. I can then reboot and things will
>> > start up just fine. Interestingly it does say something about shutting
>> > down the display manager when I reboot in such instances...
>> > 
>> > I feel like happens if I fail to start my monitor fast enough, but I'm not
>> > entirely sure. Could that be related?
>> 
>> You need your monitor on during startup; the system needs to read EDID from
>> it to be able to drive it properly. That could be your problem.
>
> After an SDDM update many months ago I started having SDDM problems similar to 
> the OP.  The SDDM display manager GUI would not launch at all - black screen.  
> Or, it would launch, but then it would appear to not take my passwd to login.  
> Or, it would seemingly login, but end up on a black screen with only a mouse 
> cursor and no desktop.  The problem was manifesting whether I was launching an 
> X11 or Wayland desktop session.  If I dropped into a console and restarted the 
> display-manager service, then SDDM launched and worked normally.  Following a 
> reboot the problem of the non-functioning SDDM was present again.
>
> I tried configuring SDDM to use x11, x11-user and wayland (experimental) with 
> kwin or weston compositor.  I tried enabling/disabling TPM in the BIOS/kernel.  
> Nothing made a difference.  The logs were not very informative to help 
> troubleshooting.
>
> This was only happening on one PC which has a new(er), faster CPU.  All older 
> and slower CPU PCs exhibited no such behaviour.  I suspected the services were 
> starting up too fast and either the haveged service didn't have enough time to 
> generate the needed entropy for SDDM, or SDDM was clashing with some other 
> service in the startup sequence.
>
> I tried adding some wait directive for the display-manager service, but when 
> that did not work I added in /etc/rc.conf:
>
> rc_display_manager_after="local"
>
> to push the display-manager at the end of the queue.  Although SDDM now takes 
> a second longer than before to come up, at least SDDM starts and I am able to 
> login normally.
>
> HTH.
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