X.org Lockups

Message

val · Post by **val** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 7:38 pm

Okay, so I just had a freeze on my newly rebuilt system. Both the mouse and keyboard froze and there was a weird line down the middle of the screen. This was with xorg 6.8 btw.

I now think there is more than one thing going on. When I sshed in, x was not taking 100% of the resources. I was emerging something. Now I am compiling with only -march=pentium3 in my cflags.

Ooops. This post was sort of meant for this thread but I will refer that thread here since it is a dupe, which I created....

Edit again: I just found this bug: http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1280
but it is only for gl apps. When you get 100% cpu, is it only with gl apps? For me, I would get a freeze anytime I was running the screensaver, many of which have 3D graphics, I'm not sure if they are gl apps? I would not get the freeze with the screensaver if I used electric sheep, which is definitely not gl, plus uses resources for computing "sheep".

And here's another bugzilla bug about only the keyboard not responding:
http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1176

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 8:43 pm

No, in fact, the GL screensavers run perfectly for any time I want. It's definitely not OpenGL, for me at least.

val · Post by **val** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 8:46 pm

wgi wrote:No, in fact, the GL screensavers run perfectly for any time I want. It's definitely not OpenGL, for me at least.

Okay. I think there are actually several different bugs with similar symptoms. This is one of the reasons it's all so hard to track down! Do you have X using 100% cpu when you freeze?

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 8:56 pm

val wrote:
wgi wrote:No, in fact, the GL screensavers run perfectly for any time I want. It's definitely not OpenGL, for me at least.
Okay. I think there are actually several different bugs with similar symptoms. This is one of the reasons it's all so hard to track down! Do you have X using 100% cpu when you freeze?

Yes, it's *very* hard to track down. I have three other boxes running fine, and this particular one used to run fine for months, too.

And yes, I get 99% (not 100

CPU usage on X when the box freezes. As I said in a couple of threads (actually a whole lot of people have those problems

) I can ssh in and sometimes manage to down the box if I immediately do so. Otherwise nothing helps - I can't kill X, and I can't shutdown cleanly.

This happens with my primary gfx card (Radeon 7200) as well as with a Matrox Millennium 400. On the other hand the box is rock solid a) without X or b) with X and nothing particular running except rss-glx screensavers. I can leave it for days.

Until now I managed to have it running for hours with nothing more than some aterms, xchat and TeamSpeak-Client running. But especially Firefox and *maybe* gkrellm and rdesktop seem to raise the chances of the box crashing. That's why I originally suspected GTK as the culprit. But I'm no longer sure about that, either :-/

val · Post by **val** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 9:00 pm

Sorry if you already mentioned this, but I don't want to sift through 4 pages again. What are you usually doing when it freezes?

For me, it usually freezes when opening a new tab in firefox or mozilla. The last time it happened, it was not 100% cpu, but using the remaining cpu left by my emerge process.

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 9:04 pm

val wrote:Sorry if you already mentioned this, but I don't want to sift through 4 pages again. What are you usually doing when it freezes?

For me, it usually freezes when opening a new tab in firefox or mozilla. The last time it happened, it was not 100% cpu, but using the remaining cpu left by my emerge process.

The usual things I have open on that particular box are: xfce4 (panel, iconbox, calendar), aterm (various instances), gkrellm, firefox, thunderbird, rdesktop, xchat and either bitlbee or gaim.

Lots of GTK (makes my stomach go upside down...). That's why I suspected it.

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Sun Oct 24, 2004 9:06 pm

Ah, and by the way, for me it does not happen when I open a new tab, at least it would have happened so seldom that I can't remember. It has a tendency to happen when I switch virtual desktops, though.

val · Post by **val** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:11 am

Okay, I just finished compiling xorg again, this time with only -march=pentium3 in my cflags. So far so good. It's only been a few hours.

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 4:27 am

val wrote:Okay, I just finished compiling xorg again, this time with only -march=pentium3 in my cflags. So far so good. It's only been a few hours.

Hm. What did you set before? I compiled with my usual "tame" CFLAGS -march=pentium3 -O2 which has never given me problems before (including on this box). If I remember correctly, I even took out anything like MMX or SSE in the USE-flags.

val · Post by **val** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 4:42 am

wgi wrote:
val wrote:Okay, I just finished compiling xorg again, this time with only -march=pentium3 in my cflags. So far so good. It's only been a few hours.
Hm. What did you set before? I compiled with my usual "tame" CFLAGS -march=pentium3 -O2 which has never given me problems before (including on this box). If I remember correctly, I even took out anything like MMX or SSE in the USE-flags.

Sorry, I am posting in two threads and mixing them up. I used the flags given in the "flying with gentoo" howto, in the documents tips and tricks forum. Basically a long list of flags. I had a wild guess that some of the instability was due to compiler flags because after I emerged --emptytree world on my laptop (which still uses xfree) with "flying" flags, I started having lockups again

I guess I should post:

desktop:
CFLAGS="-O3 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -ftracer
-ffast-math -fprefetch-loop-arrays -fforce-addr"

laptop:
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium-m -mtune=pentium-m -pipe -ftracer -fomit-frame-pointer"

Liquid Crystal · Post by **Liquid Crystal** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 1:33 pm

Guys this problem is driving me nuts!!

I only had it when I upgraded xorg during an emerge -u world

currently:
xorg version 6.8.0
windowmanager: fluxbox
processors: Pentium III 866MHz
RAM: 256MB
VGA: intel chipset

X locks up with many apps including firefox and xeyes!
However, when it locks up, I still can SSH in to it but cpu usage is very normal, X is *NOT* taking 100%

val · Post by **val** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 3:36 pm

I'm still going with my new compile... but we shall see if that lasts.

Liquid Crystal, maybe try what I did? And tell us if it improves things for you too.

John-Boy · Post by **John-Boy** » Mon Oct 25, 2004 7:53 pm

I've just briefly looked over this thread and I'm reporting the same problem here. Just happened in fact, using Firefox on KDE, the keyboard locked out, initially the mouse - although after a moment that kicked in again.

Also had a slight amount of distortion on the screen as well. Cflags are conservative (-O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -mmmx -m3dnow)

val · Post by **val** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 1:26 am

Well, I had a freeze.

It happened while using mozilla and emerging stuff at the same time. The good news, sort of, is that I was able to ssh in and kill X this time. X automatically restarted, went to the login screen and is working again. I think I can put up with this a little more because at least I don't have to reboot. Especially if it only happend when under load.

Nate_S · Post by **Nate_S** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 5:39 am

I'd agree that there are several similar problems with the same symptoms.

I was using an nvidia GFFX 5200 on this box for a while and was getting freezes quite often, in several apps but most often in firefox. I eventually gave up avter many weeks of struggle, and threw an ati radeon 9000 in here and it's been rock solid ever since.

Just today, I found a file, ~/nvidia-driver-README.txt that had some helpful suggestions. It mentioned that some freezes may be due to agp, especially on via chipsets. (I'm on a via KT333) It suggested turning off agp with Option "NvAGP" "0" and seeing if that helps, and indeed, no more freezing. I also found out that turning agp to 2x in the bios fixed the problem, although now ut2004 is very sluggish.

just thought I'd post this in case it helps anyone else.

-Nate

val · Post by **val** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 5:46 am

Thank you for that tip!

So, that option goes in xorg.conf?

Liquid Crystal · Post by **Liquid Crystal** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 9:06 am

my CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer"

I tried to disable acpi yesterday and ran xeyes to monitor the machine. It's still up and running fine now. I will keep monitoring it for the rest of the day and maybe run Firefox.

Don't you guys think it's an xorg issue? I had no problems with my earlier version (forgot what was the version number before the upgrade!)

Liquid Crystal · Post by **Liquid Crystal** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 12:44 pm

I'm not sure if this would help but I think it is worth trying, for me at least:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... 9eb80a01ff

Sieg · Post by **Sieg** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:40 pm

I've been having the same problem for months, reported in a few different threads, just had not seen this one.

For me, it's almost always been while scrolling in Firefox, 90% of the time while I was scrolling in the gentoo forums. However, I've had it a *very* few times doing other things. I tried for a long time to test different setups, but had not managed to get anything working. I've just changed to kernel drivers instead of ati-drivers, and so far I've been running without any lock-ups for 3-4 days. I have not tested it enough, but I don't think I've even been able to browse the forums that much without a crash before. I don't know if it's a mix of certain video drivers, firefox, xorg, but hopefully this will be ok.

val · Post by **val** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:44 pm

I had always thought that the reason it happens the most in mozilla is simply because that's what I'm using most of the time.....

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 4:45 pm

Sieg wrote:I've been having the same problem for months, reported in a few different threads, just had not seen this one.

For me, it's almost always been while scrolling in Firefox, 90% of the time while I was scrolling in the gentoo forums. However, I've had it a *very* few times doing other things. I tried for a long time to test different setups, but had not managed to get anything working. I've just changed to kernel drivers instead of ati-drivers, and so far I've been running without any lock-ups for 3-4 days. I have not tested it enough, but I don't think I've even been able to browse the forums that much without a crash before. I don't know if it's a mix of certain video drivers, firefox, xorg, but hopefully this will be ok.

Strange thing is that my "crash-box" uses the xorg-radeon-driver (and used the xfree-driver before). I have another box with ATI binary drivers that is, for lack of a better word, rock solid. So at least for me, it's not the ATI drivers...

Nate_S · Post by **Nate_S** » Tue Oct 26, 2004 11:29 pm

Yes, for me it's only the nvidia binary drivers, the nv driver, vesa driver, or throwing an ati card in, all result in rock-solidness. For me, it's also 90% or so in firefox, usually simply opening it, it will freeze hard while loading the home page (only ssh and sysreq still work.) If it doesn't I can make it freeze by scrolling a bit.

Yes, the option goes in xorg.conf; it is nvidia-only but the ati drivers may have a similar option. This effectively disables all agp support, which I read as all things that make agp better than pci, so gaming is impossiable, and even 2d rendering is slow. Also, just reducing the AGP to 2x from 4x (in the bios) resulted in more of a performance hit than I expected, but YMMV.

There definitly have been many threads on this topic (or similar topics; I was following about 6 of them when I was still trying to figure it out)

-Nate

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 5:12 am

Nate_S wrote:Yes, the option goes in xorg.conf; it is nvidia-only but the ati drivers may have a similar option. This effectively disables all agp support, which I read as all things that make agp better than pci, so gaming is impossiable, and even 2d rendering is slow. Also, just reducing the AGP to 2x from 4x (in the bios) resulted in more of a performance hit than I expected, but YMMV.

Seems they are doing very strange things - why would AGP be used for OpenGL *rendering* at all?

I remember once I set up a windows gaming box and forgot to install the chipset AGP drivers. I played for two days until I realized I had no AGP at all - and then it was a game playing a video that would lose its timing due to slow data transfer. But once the textures are on the card the bus is virtually not needed anymore (at least not for larger amounts of data, of course it is still needed

)

I'll check this out, for curiosity's sake.

flyfishin · Post by **flyfishin** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 5:31 pm

I have an old Dell Optiplex G110 that I've reinstalled Gentoo on two days ago. I emerged gnome and xorg-x11 and of course got xorg-x11-6.8.0-r1. I could start X and work for about 2 minutes and then the mouse and keyboard would lock up and I'd get colored vertical lines across my screen. The entire system was frozen. It didn't matter what application I was using. So I did an emerge unmerge xorg-X11 and emerge xorg-x11-6.7.0-r2. All seems to be well know.

frilled · Post by **frilled** » Wed Oct 27, 2004 5:36 pm

Bombed again. This time I was scrolling in Firefox, but not with the mouse wheel; I was dragging the scroll bar (which I usually don't do except for testing purposes). Note that I do NOT have smooth scrolling enabled (does anybody remember we had the notorious "Mozilla scrolling bug" under windoze?!)

DAMN.

I connot reproduce this bug on my other machines.

Today I tore the Matrox G400 out of my main box at the office and plugged in an nvidia MX440. Still solid.

My Radeons using binary drivers: solid.

What the heck.

X.org Lockups

Lockups with an Intel 810 video card