GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 350535
Login crashes when 100 percent disk usage
Last modified: 2013-12-16 18:36:38 UTC
Please describe the problem: GDM crashes on login when disk usage is 100% (as reported by 'df'). If I supply username/password at GDM login screen and hit enter I am momentarily dropped into a terminal window (same as if I ctrl+alt+F1) after which GDM immediately restarts. Steps to reproduce: 1. Load hard disk until usage is 100% 2. Log in using GDM Actual results: GDM apparently crashes, X session dies to terminal and GDM restarts. Expected results: GDM would not crash and Gnome would tell me that my hard disk is full. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information:
*** Bug 303520 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is not a critical bug. Lots of things go wrong if your /tmp directory fills up. I'll happily accept a patch to fix this, but it doesn't seem to be a high enough concern for anybody to provide a patch even though this issue has been documented for years. Downgrading to normal.
Free space issue is critical to lots of users, because gdm doesn't offer an userfriendly solution for user if there are no free space. It seems a very good solution for this bug is mentioned in bug #339229 : * Always keep a "place-holder file" in the user's home directory that is big enough for GDM to "do its job", so, when they log in, GDM can merely write over top of this file as it needs. * Provide some kind of "hook" that would allow each distribution to take further steps in helping an user to fix the problem. So, gdm should create place-holder file of needed size (for example ~200 kb) in /tmp after gdm starts (and display a warning message if there are no enough space for creating such file) and erase this file in /tmp before gdm starts. Also gnome-session should check for free space during login and create place-holder file (for example ~200 kb) if there are enouch space and display a warning message if there are less than ~1 Mb free space (gdm should erase place-holder file in user's home, created by gnome-session when user starts to login).
I think the placeholder file is a brilliant idea. I initially thought of "well instead of telling the user the disk is full, why not also show a window to allow freeing some space by deleting files?", but if gdm can simply "avoid needing to lock the user out", maybe that placeholder might indeed be a good idea. In any case, I would like to add that this kind of problems happen surprisingly more often than you might think :)
*** Bug 548590 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
GDM doesn't write anything into the user's home directory at login anymore, so closing.