Kernel update broke my system...I think

[jdos1]

I am noticing a problem on startup:

/usr/sbin/alsactl  load_state:1686: No soundcards found...                        [FAIL]

Then after it starts the daemons it won't start X. Instead, where it says yourhostname login: right before starting SLiM it keeps flashing and eventually says

init: Id "x"  respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

I'm not sure if the two are related but everything was working perfectly fine beforehand and now suddenly it won't boot into X.

When I run aplay -l, instead of listing my soundcards I get this:

aplay : device_list:252 No soundcards found....

Again, I'm not sure if this has anything to do with why X won't start. If I run startx I get this message:

xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Connection Refused
xinit: server error

I've also recently performed a system upgrade and it updated the kernel..

[Rubberman]

What is your video card? You may need to reinstall the video driver (proprietary nVidia drivers have this issue). Don't know about the sound card, but you could try reinstalling the driver for that also. You will need to boot into text mode (runlevel 3 on Red Hat / Fedora systems) to fix this stuff.

[jdos1]

Well, I tried reinstalling the video driver xf86-video-intel. But, since the problem obviously seems to be with updating it then installing it again doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. Am I supposed to downgrade the video driver?

[Rubberman]

Well, I tried reinstalling the video driver xf86-video-intel. But, since the problem obviously seems to be with updating it then installing it again doesn't seem to be the right thing to do. Am I supposed to downgrade the video driver?

Boot into text mode and try downgrading the driver, then rather than changing into graphics mode on reboot, just run the startx command. You can see a lot more error and status messages from the X server that way and see possibly what is going wrong with that.

[jdos1]

If downgrading the video driver works do I keep it downgraded forever? What affects does this have on the system and if there are so many problems with updating then why update at all?

[Rubberman]

If downgrading the video driver works do I keep it downgraded forever? What affects does this have on the system and if there are so many problems with updating then why update at all?

Well, sometimes it is called the "bleeding edge" for a reason. I don't know which kernel version you are running, but stuff sometimes breaks. If you boot from the old kernel, does it work properly? Most Linux systems keep the last 3-4 kernels around and you can choose from the boot menu which to run. This allows you to boot a previous kernel if the new one has a problem.

[jdos1]

I attempted to downgrade the video driver by running:

sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/xf86-video-intel-2.20.5-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz xf86-video-intel-2.20.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

The error I get is:

Error:'xf86-video-intel-2.20.4-1.x86_64.pkg.tar.xz': could not find or read package

I also tried to downgrade the kernel but I get a similar error:

Error:'linux-3.4.9-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz': duplicate target

I triple checked the package names in the pacman log just to be sure.

EDIT: Just realized I was using the command wrong. I successfully downgraded the kernel. The errors about sound went away. However, am I just supposed to stick with the old kernel? What does one do at this point? What happens next time I run pacman -Syu?

[Rubberman]

This issue will probably be fixed in a near-future kernel update; however, I strongly recommend that you report your problem to the Arch Linux bug and/or user forums. Myself, I've had to revert to an older kernel at times in the past because of some bug that made it past QA testing. As a software engineer with 30+ years experience on everything from embedded systems to large scale distributed systems (I am currently doing performance and reliability engineering on systems with 1000's of servers and millions of users) I can assure you that while not frequent, this sort of thing does happen. Reporting it is critical.

[jdos1]

Hmm, yeah perhaps I will. I've tried everything I and others can possibly think of. There seems to be no fix. I guess in this case I would just stick with my old kernel then?

[Rubberman]

Well, if it ain't broke...