Incident Report: GNOME/Xwayland Session Freeze on Rocky Linux 10 Start

Date:

2026-05-18

Target System:

dev.raulvilchez.org

OS Version:

Rocky Linux 10 (GNOME 47.5 / Mutter)

Status:

Resolved

Severity:

High

Symptoms

Immediately after a successful user authentication via GDM, the desktop environment became completely unresponsive.

  • The mouse pointer remained operational (KMS thread responsive).

  • Keyboard shortcuts, including Virtual Terminal switching (e.g., Ctrl+Alt+F3), failed to interrupt the state.

  • A hard reset was required to regain system control.

Root Cause Analysis

Log analysis from the failed boot sequence highlighted a sudden termination of the X11 compatibility layer within the Wayland session due to storage exhaustion within the local root-mapped home logical volume (/dev/mapper/rl_dev-home).

The partition was overloaded by local IDE configurations under the raul profile and static runtime binaries within the raul-ipa profile.

Resolution

Heavy configuration subdirectories and static binary clusters were migrated to the dedicated secondary storage mount point (/mnt/datos_raul/) and linked back symmetrically, followed by a purge of non-critical transient user caches.

Execution Steps

  1. Profile Migration: raul:

    # mkdir -p /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/
# cp -ax /home/raul/.vscode /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/
# rm -rf /home/raul/.vscode
# ln -s /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/.vscode /home/raul/.vscode

# cp -ax /home/raul/.config /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/
# rm -rf /home/raul/.config
# ln -s /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/.config /home/raul/.config

# cp -ax /home/raul/.local/ /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/
# rm -rf /home/raul/.local
# ln -s /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/.local /home/raul/.local

# rm -rf /home/raul/.cache/*

  2. Profile Migration: raul-ipa:

    # mkdir -p /mnt/datos_raul/home_config/bin
# cp -ax /home/raul-ipa/bin/. /mnt/datos_raul/home_config/bin/
# rm -rf /home/raul-ipa/bin
# ln -s /mnt/datos_raul/home_config/bin /home/raul-ipa/bin

  3. Permissions & Ownership Rectification:

    # chown -R raul:raul /mnt/datos_raul/home_raul_config/
# chown -h raul:raul /home/raul/.vscode /home/raul/.config /home/raul/.local

# chown -R raul-ipa:raul-ipa /mnt/datos_raul/home_config/bin/
# chown -h raul-ipa:raul-ipa /home/raul-ipa/bin

Results

The localized storage footprint for the entire /home tree dropped from 3.5 GB to 7.5 MB (a 99.7% volume reduction). The local logical volume is now effectively stateless regarding user data, preventing application runtime stalls and securing long-term OS stability.