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Illiander
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 5:10 pm    Post subject: Can I have some help diagnosing a problem? [RESOLVED] Reply with quote

I'm going to run through what's happening to me, and hopefully someone can help.

I am getting total screen, mouse and keyboard lockups.
When this happens, not even the magic SysReq keys work (Though I'm not 100% certain that I have them turned on, is there an easy way to check that doesn't involve rebuilding my kernal?)

There are two situations this has happened to me in, with a common element that I *think* narrows the search space down significantly.

The freezes only seem to happen when I have TeamSpeak running, alongside either Steam and Dota2, or VirtualBox.
So either this is somhow being caused by Teamspeak, or it's caused by Pulseaudio, or something else in the audio pipeline (I don't have much else outputing sound on my system, and I have nothing else that uses sound input that I use regularly)

Any ideas what to do to check what's happening?


Last edited by Illiander on Sun Oct 05, 2014 4:43 pm; edited 1 time in total
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lexflex
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 5:40 pm    Post subject: Re: Can I have some help diagnosing a problem? Reply with quote

Hi Illiander

Can you give some more info ?

- what desktop are you using?
- does the system resume after some time , or do you need to reset?

Some things to check:
- Temperature: What is the temperature of your system just before lock-up? ( might be the system crashes because the cpu gets too hot....).
- CPU load at moment of crash ( using top) ?

Alex.
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 5:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Easy to check, does sysrq work when it hasn't crashed? Also you can check your .config file for CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ.

Other things to check: is there an oops in the log?

Then again, most of these complete system freezes are due to motherboard/hardware issues, especially if there's no logs and not dependent on OS.
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Illiander
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 7:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm running MATE (the Gnome2 fork)
I need to restart (to be fair, I only give it about 5 seconds before I hit the power button, this always happens in the middle of a gameing session, so I can't wait on it).
SysReq keys are enabled. (Alt-SysReq-E drops me back to a terminal login)
I can't get the CPU load easily, since everything locks up, but from the VirtualBox crashes where I can still see the graphic in the System Monitor tray icon, it's not running full load on all 6 processors, might be full load on 3-4 of them.
I'll check temperature next time it happens, but I have run full system rebuilds since these freezes started happening, on all 6 processors, and they don't crash.

Where do I go to check the log? Can you give me either the file to look at, or the command to dump the log?

Help is much appreciated :)
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Illiander
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 24, 2014 7:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, the crashes are *cold*, and the processors are running at or close to 0%

What logs should I be looking at?

And is there a way to confirm if it's a hardware fault, rather than a teamspeak fault?
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eccerr0r
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 24, 2014 8:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

From my extensive experience with sudden random freezes, I'd blame hardware (power, board, connectors) before looking at software because all of the software debug lead to nothing.

If a user mode application causes a computer freeze/crash it's never the user mode application - it's the OS/driver or the hardware by design.
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Illiander
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2014 7:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ok, thanks.

Didn't really want to consider that, since I don't think I can afford to replace any hardware atm...

I'll run a full system update (including kernal), and see what happens.
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2014 6:23 pm    Post subject: Re: Can I have some help diagnosing a problem? Reply with quote

Illiander wrote:
The freezes only seem to happen when I have TeamSpeak running, alongside either Steam and Dota2, or VirtualBox.

I've often had lockups with different versions of proprietary stuff; TeamSpeak has been quite good last couple of years, though it is finicky about its audio setup. I don't use it enough to be considered anything than a novice with it, mind.
Quote:
So either this is somhow being caused by Teamspeak, or it's caused by Pulseaudio, or something else in the audio pipeline (I don't have much else outputing sound on my system, and I have nothing else that uses sound input that I use regularly)

Personally, I'd chuck Pulsefail. Just don't blame me if you try that, and it doesn't fix it. ;)

You might want to ask for live help on #gentoo (IRC: chat.freenode.net).

I know Griz64 uses teamspeak and games a lot; he's also excellent at support as well as admin and QA, so if you can, get hold of him in either #gentoo-chat or #friendly-coders and ask him nicely for help; tell him igli told you to ask, and he'll help if he's around and has time. He helps loads of people, all the time, when he is around, so it won't be a problem unless he's busy/tired.
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Illiander
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 25, 2014 7:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Believe me, I've tried ditching pulse before.

But some packages seem to rely on it a bit too much. (Something on the list of WINE, Teamspeak, Steam needed me to give in and reinstall it, if memory serves)

I just did a full update, including kernel (which let me turn on a lot of options for logging and debugging) and nvidia-drivers, so I'm hoping that that has fixed it.

If not, thanks for the recommendation. (I really should dig up an irc client at some point)
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 3:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Illiander wrote:
Believe me, I've tried ditching pulse before.

Heh fair enough.
Quote:
If not, thanks for the recommendation. (I really should dig up an irc client at some point)

You're welcome :-) Yeah you really should; #gentoo-chat is much fun, if a little crazy sometimes ;)
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Chiitoo
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 3:40 pm    Post subject: ><)))°€ Reply with quote

Teegrins, Illiander!


I feel I should point out a few things here:

Illiander wrote:
Believe me, I've tried ditching pulse before.

But some packages seem to rely on it a bit too much. (Something on the list of WINE, Teamspeak, Steam needed me to give in and reinstall it, if memory serves)

Depending on your preference, neither of Wine and Steam require PulseAudio.

In the case of Wine, the PulseAudio patches are in fact more and less unofficial still, and only included if you so choose. If you have gstreamer USE-flag enabled, that will also pull in PulseAudio at the time of writing. However, I currently believe due to my own testing and conversations with the author (who did not explicitly specify a yes or no though) that the gstreamer-specific patch can be used without the PulseAudio patches (and I have been doing just that with the Wine version in tree, 1.7.21, as well as the current 1.7.27; see bug 516006 for more on that).

As for Steam, it does seem that our wikki still lists it as a dependency for x86-systems, but I would definitely test it without it if I could at this moment. I also don't remember reading more about it other than similar doubts of other users at the talk-page of said wikki article.

TeamSpeak also seems to have a pulseaudio USE-flag.


As for the problem of yours, I've never used TeamSpeak personally, but I agree with others on that it does look like it could likely be a hardware issue. Not definitely, but likely.

I don't think you mentioned how this started. Did what you do work before without this issue, or did it start at some point? You probably made no obvious software/hardware changes lately? I'd test the simple things first: all hardware connections, add/remove hardware, test memory (if there are multiple sticks, try them out individually and in different slots, and of course, run memtest86 although memory issues have a good chance of creeping up already when compiling things).

I'd also try reproducing the issue with a different OS such as Linux Mint, or maybe Arch Linux for example. Even Windows, if possible.

As for logs, depending on your logging set-up, /var/log/messages could be one to peek into.


I know this isn't much, but I hope it helps!

Best of luck to ya in figuring out what the cause is!!
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 02, 2014 9:33 pm    Post subject: Re: ><)))°€ Reply with quote

Chiitoo wrote:
Depending on your preference, neither of Wine and Steam require PulseAudio.

In the case of Wine, the PulseAudio patches are in fact more and less unofficial still, and only included if you so choose. If you have gstreamer USE-flag enabled, that will also pull in PulseAudio at the time of writing. However, I currently believe due to my own testing and conversations with the author (who did not explicitly specify a yes or no though) that the gstreamer-specific patch can be used without the PulseAudio patches (and I have been doing just that with the Wine version in tree, 1.7.21, as well as the current 1.7.27; see bug 516006 for more on that).

Nice work on the bug, Chiitoo; that last patch looks hopeful, though from reading it perhaps you should report the issues with own-compilation directly to the upstream developer? After all the author writes: "please test before cherry picking this patch, and report success or failure to me please." I'm sure that it works for portage-built packages would be a success, and the compilation issues would likely be interesting in test-case terms.
Quote:
TeamSpeak also seems to have a pulseaudio USE-flag.

As for the problem of yours, I've never used TeamSpeak personally, but I agree with others on that it does look like it could likely be a hardware issue. Not definitely, but likely.

Well TS definitely works without pulsefail, I know that much; can't speak to what the problem here is, though I agree trying a live-disk from another distro to see how it performs would be a good idea. Knoppix was always my favourite for esoteric hardware/issues, though Ubuntu's sound setup always seems to work when I try it on friends' machines.
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Chiitoo
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 03, 2014 7:36 pm    Post subject: Re: ><)))°€ Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
Nice work on the bug, Chiitoo; that last patch looks hopeful, though from reading it perhaps you should report the issues with own-compilation directly to the upstream developer? After all the author writes: "please test before cherry picking this patch, and report success or failure to me please." I'm sure that it works for portage-built packages would be a success, and the compilation issues would likely be interesting in test-case terms.

Ahhh, I'm innocent!

I mean, I didn't do more than test patches while Maarten Lankhorst was making changes to them due to a memory leak I discovered the older versions causing. That said, I have indeed been in talks with the person. ^^

The patch seems to work fine here, whether building with Portage or in my Wine git tree(s) (apologies if I made it seem like there were compilation issues). I'm not sure how big of a thing GStreamer for Wine really is, since I've always had it disabled. To my knowledge, things that would make use of it, will produce audio just fine without. If Wine was built with it, then the applications making use of it would crash, or do something else equally horrible, and disabling the winegstreamer was necessary for users to to be able to get past the issues.

In any case, this patch looks to be fixing it finally.

I just found it odd that it was pulling in PulseAudio, so I looked into it, and the rest is, as they say, mist-story. ^^;
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steveL
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 12:59 am    Post subject: Re: ><)))°€ Reply with quote

Chiitoo wrote:
I mean, I didn't do more than test patches while Maarten Lankhorst was making changes to them due to a memory leak I discovered the older versions causing. That said, I have indeed been in talks with the person.

Ah okie fair enough.
Quote:
The patch seems to work fine here, whether building with Portage or in my Wine git tree(s) (apologies if I made it seem like there were compilation issues).

So that last comment is no longer relevant?
Quote:
I'm not sure how big of a thing GStreamer for Wine really is, since I've always had it disabled. To my knowledge, things that would make use of it, will produce audio just fine without. If Wine was built with it, then the applications making use of it would crash, or do something else equally horrible, and disabling the winegstreamer was necessary for users to to be able to get past the issues.

IDK either, though it does seem to me that everyone's "integrating" more and more closely, even when it isn't necessary. But I don't use Wine atm; haven't for years as it was always too much hassle.

Though there's more chance of me trying it again if I can do so with less bloat, so thanks :)
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 04, 2014 1:58 am    Post subject: Re: ><)))°€ Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
So that last comment is no longer relevant?

Hmmm, the comment at the bug I mentioned? Hmmm, looking back to it, I now see I worded that a bit unwell indeed. In “[...] application (Echoes) I have been testing it with now fails with my git-builds [...]” I meant that this application (Echoes) doesn't run (any longer) with the patch as it should (and as it did).

The Wine build is indeed fine, just... there's something odd going on as even going back to the same version on git that I had/have from Portage didn't produce different results, so it's at least not winegstreamer regression (and right now I have the latest, 1.7.28 via Portage with a personally updated ebuild since our Wine maintainer(s) is/are (were) missing in (or from) action, and Echoes works with that, but I digress!).

I need to clean up my git trees, probably... and maybe add a comment over there to make it clear that I didn't mean the build was broken.

steveL wrote:
IDK either, though it does seem to me that everyone's "integrating" more and more closely, even when it isn't necessary. But I don't use Wine atm; haven't for years as it was always too much hassle.

Though there's more chance of me trying it again if I can do so with less bloat, so thanks :)

Being a gamer to quite some extent makes me pretty much dependent on Wine. I'm not sure if a virtual machine would have been able to do the same for me, if Wine didn't, in which case I might not have been able to switch to full-timing Linux in the first place! Needless to say, I'm quite happy about it indeed being there. I've been getting into it more and more, and trying to go even deeper, but it's slow business for me just like everything else I try to get into doing... ^^;

I honestly can't say that I have ever had bad experiences with regards to Wine. There certainly was a lot to learn at first, and I'm still learning, but I can't pick up a seriously bad moment from my memory. Valve is of course making it less and less required with their Steam as time goes by, but they can't port them all!


Now I really digress. Apologies for the off-topic story time parts. S:


Edit: The non-working issue was probably due to ccache as I suspected, so now the comment is out-dated fer sure!
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Illiander
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PostPosted: Sun Oct 05, 2014 4:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, WINE is a lifeline in some situations.

Thanks for all the advice everyone, turns out it was a faulty motherboard/processor/RAM. (MemTest was crashing)

I *really* need to start looking for hardware faults earlier in my troubleshooting process, every time I've had issues with Linux over the last few years, I've spent ages trying to find the fault, thinking it was a software issue, and it turns out to be hardware (The other one I can remember was a damaged audio cable).
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