Unable to start Sway (Atomic commit failed: Permission denied)

[rycwo]

• Sway Version: 1.10
• Debug Logs:
  • Sway
  • DRM

Hello! I'm running Sway on Alpine Linux (Edge) on a Thinkpad X13 Gen 4. Since running a regular system update this morning I have been unable to start Sway.

I typically start the compositor according to the instructions on the Alpine wiki:

dbus-run-session -- sway

And from the VT it just hangs until I exit sway with my configured key combo.

@kennylevinsen highlighted this line from the Sway log on irc:

00:00:00.384 [DEBUG] [wlr] [backend/drm/atomic.c:79] connector eDP-1: Atomic commit failed: Permission denied

Which eventually led me to the DRM debugging page on the old wlroots wiki so I've collected logs for that too.

The issue appears to be non-deterministic as I am very occasionally able to start Sway.

---

It looks like this may be an issue with any wlroots-based compositor. I tried installing and running River with no success (similar symptoms).

[kennylevinsen]

The issue appears to be non-deterministic as I am very occasionally able to start Sway.

The main consideration there would be if something else is holding drm master status when sway starts, making seatd unable to hand it out. If this happens, seatd (the daemon) will log the error "Could not make device fd drm master" to stderr with the underlying error code.

If you increase the seatd loglevel (seatd -h debug), you will get some more information about what sway and seatd is trying to do.

[kennylevinsen]

Your DRM log also contains no errors, which is peculiar.

If you have any logs for what was upgraded, consider trying to revert the packages to figure out where the issue lies.

[rycwo]

Appreciate the help with this!

The seatd log is showing exactly the error you were suspecting:

[seatd/seat.c:387] Could not make device fd drm master: Resource busy

But I'm unable to see anything in my processes on login that might be holding drm master status:

ps afx output

If you have any logs for what was upgraded, consider trying to revert the packages to figure out where the issue lies.

To be fair this issue was happening on-and-off for the past couple months (or so?), but I would normally be able to start Sway after a reboot or two so it never pushed me to look deeper into the issue. I tried downgrading to Sway 1.9 (and dependent packages) earlier today and I had the same issue so I don't think it's Sway itself at the very least.