No Gnome response after upgrade to almalinux-8.9

General Discussion & Chat
1

Last night I upgraded using dnf to the latest kernel-4.18.0-513.9.1-el8_9.x86_64.

I then rebooted, and everything seemed normal until after I logged back in with my non-privilged account (admin). But from that point on, I cannot do anything using the Gnome GUI desktop. There is absolutely no response from the GUI.

Also, as I have access to the Root (root) account and another non-privileged account, I logged in with them too. The GUI did not respond when logged into either of them either.

Alternatively, I then switched to an alternate terminal using the keystroke -- and logged in with the admin account successfully. I thought the problem might have been with auditd and perhaps the /var/log/audit filesystem hitting the threshold of space_left but it was not the problem. I also noticed as a result that there is no log-data in /var/log/messages either. If I stop/start, or restart (explicitly) using systemctl the rsyslog.service I still see no new data in the /var/log/messages file. I also noticed that networking is actually functioning properly.

Right now, I am probing around seeking the root cause of this failure, but would love suggestions on what else might cause this strange behavior.

2

Update1

I have other VMs that are precisely the same image (Oracle VBox VMs) cloned from a single original (for the purposes of teaching myself ansible with a single master and four managed-nodes).

I targeted the kernel packages only with a dnf update and the rebooted VM has no issues with the GUI. I will try and determine which packages might be associated with the GUI not responding anymore.

3

Update2

I snapped back again and started adding targeted packages slowly over the last three (3) days:

All I had left was the following packages:

kernel             <which comes with the removal of kernel-4.18.0-477.10.1.el8_9>
kernel-core        <which comes with the removal of kernel-core-4.18.0-477.10.1.el8_9>
kernel-modules     <which comes with the removal of kernel-modules-4.18.0-477.10.1.el8_9>

kernel-tools
kernel-tools-libs
kexec-tools
kmod-kvdo

However, when I executed dnf update kmod-kvdo it entailed dependencies of:
kernel-core
kernel-modules
but not explicitly kernel as a dependency update but with the removal of kernel-4.18.0-477.10.1.el8_9.

Does anybody have any ideas?