[SOLVED] gdm randomly fails on boot

Question

Hello everybody,
I'm new to arch and it took me some time to get everything going, but now it works almost without issues. One not really critical, but very annoying thing is the following:
Sometimes when booting the system (pure systemd setup), gdm will not start (i. e. no graphical login appears). Instead, I'm directed to tty1, have to log in and do systemctl stop/start gdm.service. I have absolutely no idea why it is working sometimes and sometimes not - it seems like a random phenomenon... Here are the Xorg.log files of the situation when everything's working and when it's not:
working: http://pastie.org/private/szwlmvl8pcbcaoe0xurba
failing: http://pastie.org/private/webtcyiyktdwkeke8rb9kq
The output is not very conclusive, in my opinion. What other logfiles could be helpful?
Thanks for your help in advance!
Last edited by michaels (2012-10-24 20:47:19)

Answer 1

1) to push this one a little...
2) to give some more information: Checking the output of journalctl thoroughly, I found out that in the not-working case the gdm error messages (GDM display: display lasted xxx seconds / maximum number of X display failures reached) appear between messages from the kernel. Those indicate that the system is still busy loading kernel modules (device drivers for sound and chipset, in particular). Maybe some modules which are needed for the X server to run properly aren't loaded when systemd attempts to start gdm? Then, how to apply a timeout or, even better, a proper dependency to gdm.service unit?
journal failing: http://pastie.org/private/0k6fjkoievd7k90ytnqdq
journal working (truncated after gdm started successfully): http://pastie.org/private/orbvisc9hbjgmosxplmtra
I also tried to upgrade gdm from [testing] with all its dependencies, but this does not work at all.