leapp fails in reboot phase with "Cannot obtain data about the DNF configuration" error message

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8 and 9
    • leapp

Issue

  • When rebooting the system to perform the real upgrade, leapp fails early and reports the following error

    [   88.852946] upgrade[812]: Following errors occurred and the upgrade cannot continue:
[   88.853584] upgrade[812]:     1. Actor: dnf_upgrade_transaction
[   88.854091] upgrade[812]:        Message: Cannot obtain data about the DNF configuration

Resolution

Follow the procedure described in the Diagnostic Steps section.
If this is a match, proceed further, otherwise or if in doubt, open a case on the Customer Portal referencing this solution.

  1. Reboot the system on the ancient kernel

  2. Edit /etc/fstab to comment out the /run entry

  3. Execute leapp upgrade again

  4. Reboot to perform the real upgrade

If the issue persists, open a case on the Customer Portal and reference this solution.

Root Cause

When having an entry for /run in /etc/fstab, the mount -a command being executed by leapp internally will remount a new empty /run on top of existing /run, which was previously populated for systemd usage.
Due to the new /run being empty, the systemd-nspawn containers executed by leapp will fail.

The issue is tracked on RHEL8 by This content is not included.RHEL-93148 - leapp dies in reboot phase with "Cannot obtain data about the DNF configuration".

Diagnostic Steps

  • Confirm that /etc/fstab contains an entry for /run 

    # grep -w "/run" /etc/fstab
none     /run    tmpfs    [...parameters...]    0 0
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