Subject: bug#52051: [core-updates-frozen] cannot login ('org.freedesktop.login1' service times out)

From: Timothy Sample <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2021 04:31:27 -0500

Hello,

I dug out an old HDD, put it in my X200, and was able to reproduce this.
Eventually I was able to log in to the thing by fiddling with the
“auth_timeout” parameter in the D-Bus config.

Josselin Poiret <[email-masked]> writes:

> [...]
>
> Would it be possible to get both the elogind strace and the dbus log for
> the same session?  We could then simply `grep` the authentication cookie
> sent back by dbus to elogind to track the corresponding fd in the dbus
> log.

This is exactly what I did (thanks for posting the patches, Maxim).
While looking around in the D-Bus log, I noticed it complaining about
authentication expiry around where it mentions the PID of elogind.  This
is in Maxim’s log, too.  It counts down an authentication expiry with
messages like “Connection 0x23b9f50 authentication expires in ...”.
That brought me to the D-Bus NEWS file, which mentions adjusting
“auth_timeout” to fix a boot regression for users with older hardware
[1].  The NEWS file mentions a bug report [2] that discusses how this
might be related to hard disk speed.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus/-/blob/master/NEWS#L2487
[2] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86431#c3

After reading that I tried with the timeout bumped up to a minute, and
the X200 booted into GDM just fine, twice in row, and then failed again
when I removed the change.  (I should add that it still printed the
“elogind is already running” messages, but it worked anyway.)

What’s weird is that this bug is very old (2014), and the default
timeout was increased at the time from 5s to 30s to solve the bug.  So
it’s part of the story, but not the whole story.

-- Tim