yum update: Fatal error, run database recovery ??

[Seth Vidal]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009, Panu Matilainen wrote:

> No, the issue is that rpm died while in middle of Berkeley DB call which is 
> something that obviously should not happen and this is a situation which 
> doesn't get automatically cleaned up, so you need manual 'rm -f 
> /var/lib/rpm/__*' to continue.
>
> What made rpm die in this manner is another question, and typically pretty 
> much impossible to figure out afterwards. Basically it either crashed or was 
> kill -9'ed while in middle of operating on rpmdb. Filesystem bugs can/will 
> certainly make rpm(db) blow up in dramatic ways, and there was some 
> indication that early ext4 made rpm unhappy but haven't seen any "evidence" 
> of ext4 being more problematic than ext3 recently.
> At some point (but fixed since AFAIK) canceling searches in PackageKit could 
> trigger this due to using kill -9 on the backend.
>
> You might want to check logs for segfaults from yum, rpm and related pieces. 
> If there's nothing there... impossible to say.

or of PK. It seems like we've been seeing a lot of these when PK is 
running.

-sv