Random computer lock ups on KDE

Message

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 5:15 pm

Hi, I'm running the latest stable KDE (4.4.5) and all of a sudden my computer seems to be locking up at random.

KDE seems to freeze although I can alt-tab between windows for a bit before it degrades and I can't do anything except move the mouse icon.

If I then do Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a command prompt I find that I can enter my username, but then pressing enter makes the system hang on a blinking cursor without presenting the password prompt. There is then nothing that I can do except stare at the blinking cursor.

I thought it could be something to do with my hard drive going wrong but I don't have these problems when I dual boot into Windows XP. I've used smartctl to get some info on the hard drive but it seems fine. Memtest86 gives me fine results too.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Dave.

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 7:32 pm

dave_deu wrote:Hi, I'm running the latest stable KDE (4.4.5) and all of a sudden my computer seems to be locking up at random.

KDE seems to freeze although I can alt-tab between windows for a bit before it degrades and I can't do anything except move the mouse icon.

If I then do Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a command prompt I find that I can enter my username, but then pressing enter makes the system hang on a blinking cursor without presenting the password prompt. There is then nothing that I can do except stare at the blinking cursor.

I thought it could be something to do with my hard drive going wrong but I don't have these problems when I dual boot into Windows XP. I've used smartctl to get some info on the hard drive but it seems fine. Memtest86 gives me fine results too.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Dave.

I had a similar issue. The problem turned out to be a huge dust accumulation in my graphics card. Cleaning my graphics card with compressed air fixed the issue.

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 8:36 pm

Hi, should have mentioned I've cleaned all the dust off the CPU heat sink and also the dust off the graphics card but thanks for the suggestion.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 1:35 am

dave_deu wrote:Hi, should have mentioned I've cleaned all the dust off the CPU heat sink and also the dust off the graphics card but thanks for the suggestion.

Dave

What graphics card and drivers are you using? Have you tried using a different graphics card? There is a possibility that your graphics card is bad.

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:55 pm

I'm using a quite old Nvidia 5800 card. It's worked fine for the last 5 years. Maybe it _is_ on its way out? It doesn't feel hot though, and there was a time a couple of years ago when I did get crashes because it was bunged up with dust and it got really hot. (It doesn't get hot now)

Dave

baaann · Post by **baaann** » Tue Mar 01, 2011 11:52 am

Could it be the Strigi indexer kicking in and using up your available memory? I have seen this, under admittedly very heavy usage(3-4 concurrent users with openoffice/evolution/okular amongst others), on a sempron2600 with 1.5G ram and 1G swap

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Wed Mar 02, 2011 11:38 pm

Hi, I think that is a good suggestion.

How can I get Strigi to log somwhere to tell me it's started? My system log is so sparse of information that it's hard to tell what went wrong, and of course if I can't even type in a password so what are the changes of the error being logged to disk?

Dave

baaann · Post by **baaann** » Thu Mar 03, 2011 12:58 am

An icon appears in the system tray while it is indexing, I am not sure how you would obtain logs.
Unless you really need it I would try disabling it in

System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Search

and see how your system runs thereafter

FWIW it seems to run more efficiently and produce far better results under KDE-4.6, although that is on my desktop which doesn't have the same loading

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Thu Mar 03, 2011 11:23 pm

It turns out that Nepomuk is already disabled and in the memory section it's listed as limited to 50MB. My PC has been more stable in the last few days, but probably because it hasn't been left turned on for so long.

Thanks for the tip though.

Dave

psdasilva · Post by **psdasilva** » Fri Mar 04, 2011 6:27 pm

I had the same problem yesterday! It occured after I issued a grep over a 2GB file. It used a lot of memory and almost froze my computer. KDE remained locked, except for ALT-TABS, after grep ended. Needed to ALT-BACKSPACE an login again.

Today the same problem occured to my wife on a different computer and she was only using firefox!!

The only thing I did recently was a normal update (emerge -DNu ...) on tuesday.

BTW, I don't have strigi working.

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Fri Mar 04, 2011 8:40 pm

Hmm, something is afoot. I am running a stable (not ~x86) KDE system too. I have never had a crash on Windows (I dual boot) despite using the system resources in a similar way.

I have Nvidia graphics so for the time being unless there are better suggestions, I'm putting the issue down to a dodgy graphics driver. I'll use my onboard graphics and see if that improves the situation.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 6:23 am

I did not think of any suggestions earlier, but now I have one. When this happens, ssh into your system remotely and get dmesg output and your Xorg server logs. Running nvidia-bug-report.sh to provide a bug report for nvidia that you can submit at nvnews.net would not be a bad idea.

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 10:39 am

Hmm, I dismissed this idea before due to the networking complexities but maybe I could use putty on my phone to ssh in over the local network. I'll give it a go.

Thanks,
Dave

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:04 pm

It locked up again with only alt-tab and alt-f1 working for a few keypresses. I sshed in and after entering my username it hung up. You can hear a brief disc access after the username is enter.

Exactly the same happens when I am logged in locally; you go to alt-f1 console, enter the username (any) and the PC hangs with a flashing cursor without putting up the password prompt.

Thereafter there is no hard disc access that I can hear.

My conclusion is that something in KDE is taking 100% of CPU with no disc access. Or maybe something to do with Firefox. I'm going to try running KDE without Amarok up too.

Dave

xdarma · Post by **xdarma** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 6:32 pm

Similar problem on my system, the culprit was the hp-tray.
Rebuilding all involded things (like sip, PyQt4, pykde4, and hplip) seems ok.
python-updater too can be useful.

Hope this helps.

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 7:34 pm

Thanks for the tip. I assume you are referring to a proprietary HP application that resides in the system tray? Sadly I don't have any of those.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Sat Mar 05, 2011 8:19 pm

dave_deu wrote:Thanks for the tip. I assume you are referring to a proprietary HP application that resides in the system tray? Sadly I don't have any of those.

Dave

This is a shot in the dark, but try disabling compositing for a few days and see if the problem occurs again. This could be graphics related.

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Sun Mar 06, 2011 7:17 pm

Tried disabling compositing but it still locks up.

Cheers anyway.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 4:18 am

dave_deu wrote:Tried disabling compositing but it still locks up.

Cheers anyway.

Dave

What CPU do you have? It might need a microcode update. If it is an Intel CPU, try emerging microcode-ctl, start it (i.e. /etc/init.d/microcode_ctl start) and add it to the default run level (rc-update add microcode_ctl default). Make sure that you have support for this in your kernel. If it is an AMD CPU, I am not sure how to do the microcode update from userland, although I do know that the kernel has support for microcode updates if you choose to compile it with support. Microcode updates sometimes ship with new BIOS versions, although the best way to ensure that you have the latest update is to configure Linux to do them.

Microsoft Windows ships with Intel's microcode, so sometimes you encounter a situation where it is stable on hardware and Linux is not. I should have thought of this earlier, but microcode updates are so rarely discussed that most people don't know to check it when troubleshooting and those that do usually do not think about it.

wjb · Post by **wjb** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 10:44 am

Did you look at the X logs yet: /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

dave_deu · Post by **dave_deu** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm

Hi, thanks for the microcode tip however I run an AMD processor and as I understand it the microcode update would only improve the performance of the chip and is not designed to fix bugs.

I'll check the server logs tonight, however by chance yesterday I noticed that the PC crashed when Kmail was checking for new mail so I am running my PC without Kmail for a week.

Dave

baaann · Post by **baaann** » Mon Mar 07, 2011 3:48 pm

It would be quite crude, but why not leave top running in konsole on your desktop? It would allow you to see the system status at lock up

Shining Arcanine · Post by **Shining Arcanine** » Tue Mar 08, 2011 1:52 am

wjb wrote:Did you look at the X logs yet: /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

I made that suggestion earlier. I hate to specify names because the Xorg logs go by screen number. In the original poster's case, he would be starting X after a crash, so he would want the /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old file provided that his desktop uses screen 0.

dave_deu wrote:Hi, thanks for the microcode tip however I run an AMD processor and as I understand it the microcode update would only improve the performance of the chip and is not designed to fix bugs.

I'll check the server logs tonight, however by chance yesterday I noticed that the PC crashed when Kmail was checking for new mail so I am running my PC without Kmail for a week.

Dave

Microcode exists so that manufacturers can correct bugs without having to replace physical silicon. Sometimes the bugs involve a fairly large drop in performance. An famous example of this is the AMD TLB errata:

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/7391-micr ... b-erratar/

You should look into a microcode update. It might fix the issue.

Random computer lock ups on KDE

Random computer lock ups on KDE

Re: Random computer lock ups on KDE