GNOME fails to start if the system time is off

[jnettlet]

I need to look into this further to see what is actually failing. Looks to be some interaction between gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-session.

[martin.langhoff]

Steps to repro

• boot to sugar
• switch desktop to gnome
• sudo date -s 1/1/1970
• sudo hwclock --hctosys
• reboot

You'll want a serial adapter or ssh in -- using a VT is painful given systemd restart policy.

Gnome-settings-daemon is dumping core. I added ulimit -c unlimited to olpc-session and grabbed a couple coredumps and got backtraces. The backtraces are odd, and seem to imply missing glibc debuginfo (which I definitely have installed). Uploading them soon.

All of this was done on build 5.

[martin.langhoff]

Cores and backtraces uploaded to http://dev.laptop.org/~martin/11714/

[martin.langhoff]

This definitely repros with current F17. Upstream bug at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=809707

Repro steps with upstream Fedora:

qemu-kvm --cdrom ~/Downloads/Fedora-17-Alpha-i686-Live-Desktop.iso --rtc base=2000-01-01T00:00:00 -m 512

[martin.langhoff]

Fedora BZ for the stray starttime in beefy-miracle.xml - this indicates an easy workaround should upstream drop the ball: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=810086

GNOME upstream bug for the crash https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=673551

[dsd]

Fixed in gnome-desktop3-3.4.1-2.fc17 to be pushed in GNOME-3.4.1 update. ARM build pending.

[dsd]

12.1.0 build 8 fixes this for XO-1 and XO-1.75, but the ARM build is still pending.

[dsd]

Test in 12.1.0 build 9.

[greenfeld]

GNOME starts even if the hwclock is set back to 2000 (it's limit) or Linux's system time is set to January 1970 in 12.1.0 os11.