F24 to F25 upgrade notes

Fedora 25 released, most things seem to work apart from…

My target environment was my main test machine, intel x64 with 8 cores and 32Gb of memory and LUKS encrypted disks; and a lot of KVM VMs on it. But the upgrade was to the host machine itself not to one of the guests.

Upgrade/Downgrade notes

For a change I used the recomended method to upgrade from F24 to F25, the DNF upgrade plugin. For a change it worked flawlessly.

It is not possible to rollback to F24 using

dnf distro-sync --releasever=24 --allowerasing

It downloaded 1.7Gb, and failed with debendencies on gdb and gdb-libs, a few other unimportant libs as well. Tried to remove those packages but a no-go, to many other things depended on them (systemd being one of them and I have an idea trying to remove that package would have 100s of dependencies stopping it being removed).

So if you upgrade to F25 you cannot get back to F24 (unless you have a Clonezilla backup or simlilar to bare-metal restore from).

All Issues Found after two weeks use

These are the issues found running it on a server that is also a backup desktop so includes a GUI user interface I can use.

No real ‘desktop’ applications have been tested as it is primarily used as a server; the only GUI application tested was the synergy client; the synergy server component I have not tested on F25 as my server is a client :-).

1. Synergy Client (needs QT4, does Gnome now use QT5 ?)
   • distro version does not work under the new Gnome desktop (no keyboard/mouse events processed)
   • latest version from github does not compile on F25 (complains header files that do exist cannot be found)
   • tried ‘dnf groupinstall kde’; and synergy works logging on using plasma (logon prompt option for kde)
   • works if logging on using Gnome classic (logon prompt option)
   • works is logging on using Gnome using X-Org (logon prompt option)
   • So if using synergy do not use the new ‘default’ Gnome desktop
2. Hypervisor running KVM instances (or killing the host machine)
   • virsh commands will occasionally hang, causing a GUI interface hang
   • hang can also be triggered occasionally by running virt-manager, it will freeze unable to list the virsh instances and also hang the GUI
   • when the system has hung

   it is possible to ssh into the machine but the commands ‘shutdown -h now’, ‘reboot’ and ‘halt’ just return to the command prompt; ‘systemctl reboot’ logs a few timeout messages as it tries to chat to something and returns to the command prompt. Using the physical machine reset/power button is the only way to resolve this which is a pain if multiple VMs are running

3. note this is intermittent, but has happened randomly multiple times, has happened at ‘virsh start’, virt-install and virt-manager commands. After the physical machine has been reset or power recycled exactly the same commands work; so it is not repeatable on demand but is happening a lot
4. via the normal ‘dnf update’ I have installed all available updates (including kernel) many times over the last few weeks but the problem persists… but I am sure it will be eventually sorted out, in the meantime F25 is not production ready (as of 14Dec2017) for any server using KVM guests
5. Not yet tested
   • hercules, that will be tested in a VM as I run it in KVM machines now
   • 99% of GUI applications. On my test machine the only apps I start under Gnome are ‘terminal’, the synergy client and occasionally virt-manager to get a local console to a VM if remote VNC console connections fail for some reason
   • custom SELinux rules. My existing rules survived the upgrade and I have no need to compile new rules at this time

Summary

I will leave F25 on my main test machine and live with the ‘freezes’. I will not install it onto any of my other machines until the ‘freezes’ stop via one of the eventual updates that are bound to occur.

All the core functions seem to work just fine