Random Lockups..

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

My new Gentoo System locks up and requires a hard boot every now and again, the screen freezes I get no keyboard lights working, the mouse doesn't work (I haven't tested if its pingable yet.. next time it happens I'll try that) .. I'm not compiling or anything.. I'm normally just chatting, or browsing or doing nothing.. any idea on what I should be looking for to fix it?

Thanks in advance..
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Sir Al · Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2003 6:29 am Post subject: Re: Random Lockups..

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

I don't get blinking lights.. or any debug info spew out.. its just a total freeze..

I tested the netowork connection from another machine, it wasn't pingable when it was in a frozen state.

Also I noticed that if the hard drive was working when it froze, it will stay in a contsant "activity" mode, but if the Hard disk is not active when it freezes then there will be no hd activity in the frozen state..
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Rune · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2002 Posts: 29 Location: Winnipeg

Did you bychance emerge a newer version of glibc recently? I'm having the same issue and the only thing that changed was upgrading from the glibc version that was compiled when I had installed gnome2.

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

How do I find out?
Its a newly built machine and I'm a n00b :-P

It ran perfectly under windows so I'm pretty sure there is no hardware faults..

I'm running a test at the moment by doing this:
I ctrl - alt - F1 then killall -9 /etc/X11/X (as well as KDM)
And now I'm doing an "emerge americas-army" to try and put some load on it for a an hour or two..

I have a feeling that its something to do with X/KDE because I wasn't locking up like this before I got a GUI.

The test today should give me an indication if that idea is correct...
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Rune · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2002 Posts: 29 Location: Winnipeg

You would most likely know if you did since you would need to do emerge -u glibc or emerge -u system or world to do such a thing. I did either system or world and it upgraded it and since that day my system has been doing the exact same things you're seeing which is why I mentioned it.

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

Ok.
My test today was successfull.. I emrge'd the whole enemy territory it took about 3 hours and then my machine sat without X running for 10 hours without a freeze at all..
So my guess is its something to do with X.. any ideas guys?
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senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

Did some more alterrations.. it didn't seem to help much.. I still had three more lockups tonight..

I'm going to leave the deskop running as root, and see if that makes a diff..

I wish there was a better way to trouble shoot these things.. but its a complete and utter total system lockup.. so I can't find a way to see whats locking it all up :-(

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mitchwinkle · n00b Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 6

I too had this problem and went through 3 differrent kernels before just removing Gnome and it's minions, well, except for GTK and GTK2 cuz I need them for eclipse.

No lockups since.

Now I am happily running for days with Fluxbox, and have found replacements for the little niceties of Gnome/KDE. There are plenty of alternatives out there if you take the time to look.

Best of luck. If you decide to remove Gnome, search on "remove gnome" in the forums, there's one entry with a simple two command way to get it done.

If I can find it again, I'll post a linke here...

MW
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MasterX · Veteran Joined: 26 Jun 2003 Posts: 1165

mitchwinkle · n00b Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 6

Found it...

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=58757&highlight=remove+gnome&sid=ee62763cc4ba1785e7c76490572f49c9

This worked for me...second reply to the message above has the two shell commands....

MW
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senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

Thanks guys.. I really appreciate the help..

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

I went looking through my .xsession-errors and found this guff :-P

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

I don't mind a bit of troubleshooting.. but not getting any success time after time is starting to wear me down..

OK..
I did the "remove Gnome" thing...and it didn't do anything for me.. My system has crashed 3 times since then.. :-(

I'm considering doing this : https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=32529&highlight=baddrawable (remove the Athlon XP flags and recompile ).

I can do major compiles with this system, I can even play an hour or two of ET without a hiccup.. but just browsing or chatting or not doing ANYTHING, will cause the complete lockups...

I emerged GKRELLM and had that running to try and see if it would give me a hint of whats going on.. the only strange thing I saw was every time a line of text appeared in xchat I would get a spike of activity on hdb..
This is strange because hdb wasn't even mounted..
The other strange thing is I got NO actvity at all on hda.. I'm guessing that it was lying to me and got the two drives mixed up...

Tonight I'll leave 4 sessions open of " tail -f /var/log/somelogfile " so when it freezes up I can see what was last to be logged.

I think I'll do .xsessions-errors kernel xfree86 and criticle..
any other idea's guys.. I'm rapidly being backed into a corner with my choices here..

oh yeah.. I emerged memtest86 but I don't know how to use it.. can anyone tell me?
Also someone suggested I should run tests on the hard drives from off a live CD.. I lost the info he gave me in a freeze.. can someone suggest what I should do?
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senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

while I'm at work today I'm leaving my machine running at the GUI login screen (KDM? XDM? I'm not sure which I'm using), I theory this is before any of KDE is started.. so if it doesn't crash at all today then that lends wieght to to the arguement that KDE is causing all my hassles..

would this mode of thinking be right?
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senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

Well no lockups all day.. At a guess I'd say it was KDE that was killing my machine..
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bosje · Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 12:17 pm Post subject:

I've kind of the same problem. I can work whole day and do anything on my pc as long as I do not access my SATA Seagate Barracuda 120G disk, which is mounted somewhere on my /home dir.

I can guarantee a lockup when I write a file > 200MB on that disk. Working on hda (which is normal ide) does not lock the system. I've tried many different stettings (hdparm -X66 -d1 /dev/hde, echo max_kb_per_request:15 > /proc/ide/hde/settings, etc) but to no success.

I've tested the disk with the Seagate utility, but the disk seems to be clean. Using badblocks also locks the disk after a while.

I have no clue if it is a problem in the drivers (siimage driver) or if I got rotten hardware. The shop will only give support if I install windows!

I cant help you, but you're not alone (unfortunately).

Mike

ASUS A7N8X dlx
ATHLON XP 2500+
Seagate Barracuda ST3120026AS
Maxtor 6L040J2
Kernel 2.4.21-rc7 (vanilla)

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

OK here is my XF86Config

mitchwinkle · n00b Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 6

I didn't have KDE installed, but a few components, like konsole which I like were installed, so some of the base packages of KDE were installed.

I also removed any trace of KDE as well as Gnome, so if you find that it was something in KDE, maybe I'll try Gnome again. I have come to really like Fluxbox's simplicity and don't really miss anything but a quality file manager, and only that occasionally.

Mitch
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Rune · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2002 Posts: 29 Location: Winnipeg

My random lockups were ram

i hate replacing hardware

chammel · Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2003 5:06 pm Post subject:

I have had this exact problem. My system would lock up tighter than a drum. Only the Hard Disk light would be on solid. Have to power down to reset the system.

This is on a brand new homebrew system so I am very leary of bios setting and hardware. I ran many memory and harddisk test all passing. Since I have run linux for a while I know that it sometimes can be fickle with new hardware. I tried a number of different kernel and boot setting none with any success.

I then tried messing with bios to see if any setting here would guarantee stability. What I found was that if enabled UDMA in the bios on my harddrive I could lockup the system in about 10-15 min flat. If on the other hand I disable UDMA in the bios for my harddist everything works and I have had no lockups other than my own stupidity.

Chris
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AMD +2500 Barton
Kingston PC3700 512 MB RAM
MSI K7N2G-ILSR Nforce2 with Integrated graphics
Maxtor 60GB ATA-133 DiamondMax Plus 9

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

might look at that later...

I decided to have a look at flux box.. and guess what no crashes at all... all night long..

but I've also noticed that I don't have any sound (will fix that later), and a thought occured to me.. It could have been ALSA that caused the crashes..

I'll try that theaory out tonight I think.. any idea's on how I can test that idea out??

oh also.. how do I get the "Euphoria" screen saver in fluxbox?? :?:

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acarlyle · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2003 Posts: 18

i just built a new machine also, used a GF3ti200 and an NF7-S as the a7n8x deluxe kept eating my SATA hard drives and shared like 8 devices on 1 irq anyway to the point

i have found that in the kernel having vesa framebuffer installed is ok but i get lockups when using the video=vesa:mtrr,ywrap options... it actually happens more when kde is running but it locks up nonetheless after a day or two while not in a gui

i have tried a few different settings for the video= cna nothing worked so i removed them and so far its been 3 days and no lockup

senectus · Guru Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 534

fishhead · Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2003 7:49 pm Post subject:

If you used the "gentoo-sources" for your kernel instead of the vanella sources, this could be a problem. On one machine I had, the gentoo sources would lock up every few hours, whereas with the vannella sources, it's been up for 80+ days. I've seen a lot of people just have lockups with the gentoo kernel, in fact, I think just about everyone who I know that used it has.