Failed to load SELinux Policy Freezing

Failed to load SELinux policy freezing. Well, that’s a new one – at least for me. So what went wrong?

While performing some configuration changes on one of my Linux hosts, I needed to temporarily disable SELinux to test. Easy enough, right? Edit /etc/selinux/config and change SELINUX to disabled.

Changes made, host rebooted. I go off to perform another task, and when I come back to check on it I cannot log in. I load up the console and it’s stuck at loading CentOS. When I pull up the console logs, I see this:

failed to load SELinux policy freezing
[!!!!!!] Failed to load SELinux policy, freezing.

That doesn’t look good. To resolve, we need to disable SELinux and allow normal boot:

recover selinux freezing
  • Press “e” at the boot screen to edit the startup parameters.
  • Modify the line that starts with “linux16” and append “selinux=0” to the end
  • Press “ctrl+x” to boot.

This allows us to boot with SELinux disabled. We can now re-edit the SELinux configuration file and fix our typo.

29 responses to “Failed to load SELinux Policy Freezing

  1. Thanks for this article, it helped not only solve the selinux error but several other ones on boot. It was really useful to learn how to edit startup parameters!

  2. Hi, I hace sane problema with centos 7, idon’t see a line start with “linux16″ after enter “e”.
    Can You help me, please.

  3. Thanks! This saved my bacon. However I have to do this every time my virtual machine boots up. Is there a way to permanently fix this problem? Thanks again!!!

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