Hi

I think I have found bug in KDM. Below you will find steps to reproduce, what I have tried to solve the issue and my system information. I can not check if this problem occurs also on another hardware/distribution. Can you please check that and provide your answers here? I want to know if I should file a bug report to bugs.kde.org or my distribution BTS. Or maybe it is hardware fault?

Steps to reproduce:
1. Login as any user in TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F1)
2. Login as any user to KDE through KDM
3. Logout of KDE session
4. While KDM is restarting (it may be only a brief moment, so you have to make it quick), switch to TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F1 again).

Outcome of action:
When KDM starts again, it is frozen - mouse and keyboard does not works. You can not do anything, be it switching to TTY and restarting KDM or checking if some process takes all CPU cycles. Computer is totally unusable, at least locally. I can not check if it is still accessible through SSH or something.
BUT KDM login prompt blinks in and out and greeter clock changes. You can also press power button and system shuts down clearly (no fsck forced on next boot). So it seems that only input is frozen, but it is enough to make computer unusable.

My /var/log/daemon.log is polluted with .default.face error messages, but they seem to be unrelated.
The only other interesting log is /var/log/kdm.log, which I have posted there: http://pastebin.com/XkfWWbyM
As you can see, only "0 total bytes 0 private allocs" part is not in every log, so it may be something useful.

What I have tried (ineffectively, though):
1. changing kdmrc option GrabInput to "Never"
2. plugging out and in mouse
3. another greeter theme
4. disable greeter theming at all
5. removing xorg.conf (I still had one)
6. creating /usr/share/apps/kdm/faces/.default.face and /usr/share/apps/kdm/faces/.default.face.icon files
7. waiting around five-ten minutes for system to unfreeze itself
8. removing /var/tmp/kdecache-kdm/

What I have not tried:
1. SSH-ing into box
2. earlier KDM version
3. another distribution
4. another hardware

My system settings:
Debian testing amd64, KDE SC 4.8.4-2 from Debian repo, Intel video card (open source driver i915).


This issue is somehow similar to viewtopic.php?f=66&t=99606 (please see that thread and linked bug reports). But they were created by lack of face icon file and hardware issues. I have not had this issue until today's upgrade, so I am willing to think that this is bug in KDM.

So, to sum thing up:
can you please check if you can reproduce the bug? Please post your distribution name, architecture, KDE SC/KDM (if differs) version and if you can reproduce. This will help me to decide if I should post this on BKO or Debian's BTS.
Of course if someone with better understanding of KDE internals knows something about this and can help to solve or narrow down the problem, it would be even better .

Is there a bug on bugs.kde.org in regards to this?
Your instructions are very clear from what I can tell.

Hi bcooksley

There is no bug report as far as I can tell.
I decided to ask on this forum first and ask people if they can reproduce it. If they can, then this is KDE bug and I should post it to bugs.kde.org. If they can't then there is something wrong with my setup and I should not waste KDE devs time with invalid bug report.

But I must admit that I did not search BKO before your message. Now I did and I found #77608, which is 8 years old and was eventually marked as invalid. Initial message there pointed me to TerminateServer variable in kdmrc file (in [X-:*-Core] section). When set to true, my problem disappears - which may mean that this was not KDM issue after all.

Do you think I should post my message to bugs.kde.org?

Given the presence of an existing bug, I would not recommend filing an existing bug.
Based on that bug report, it is probably a bug in X itself.

As this perhaps is X issue after all, and workaround is available, I have not posted anything on bugs.kde.org.
Thanks for your messages, they have cleared some things to me. I am using KDE SC for a year now, but I have not really involve to KDE community and this is still new to me, how things work here.