Upgrading to OpenSUSE Leap 15.0

Upgrading from Leap 42.3 to Leap 15.0... How hard can it be? Well, there was a bit of fighting necessary. One fight due to an encrypted root partition, another one due to NVIDIA and libGL.

I used the zypper upgrade method, from a text virtual terminal (after stopping X), which always seems safer to me than booting on a USB disk and hoping the partition setup is correct.

After a successful zypper dup, the first reboot led to an error like "Failed to start systemd.cryptsetup@long_name_here.service, see systemctl status blah blah" (yeah right, with no root partition mounted, there are no logs anywhere)

Booting in rescue mode on a USB key and doing cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda6 cr worked, so no issue with crypto libraries or something, it was just systemd being stupid. I mounted the root partition into /mnt and edited its /etc/crypttab. Turns out the last argument on each line was timeout=0 (due to something I tried a long ago, it's supposed to work, but it doesn't seem to), which I replaced with none, and while at it I also replaced the /dev/disk/by-id device name with a UUID (found with blkid /dev/sda6), as suggested on a forum. After the usual mkinitrd and update-bootloader --refresh, and a reboot, it worked, it's now asking my for my crypto password! Much better. I'm not happy about systemd-cryptsetup's error handling here....

Next problem: I got a mouse cursor, but sddm doesn't show up, can't log in. journalctl -S today says sddm-greeter crashed. gdb on a core dump shows it crashed in glXMakeCurrentReadSGI rcxdm stop and startx gets me an X session, but kwin_x11 crashes often, also in glXMakeCurrentReadSGI

Clearly a GL problem. glxinfo says:

libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

Using strace -e file glxinfo |& grep -i libgl, I found the problem. /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1 was a symlink to libGL.so.1.2.0, which rpm -qf said it didn't come from any RPM. On the other hand there was a libGL.so.1.0.0 in that directory too, coming from Leap 15's libglvnd. Removing libGL.so.1.2.0 and making the symlink point to libGL.so.1.0.0 fixed the issue. After a reboot I finally have sddm and plasma working.

Maybe this helps someone out there....