X.org Lockups (part III)

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun May 13, 2007 10:34 pm Post subject: X.org Lockups (part III)

Contines This thread
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

dlublink · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Sep 2006 Posts: 146

I had my Xorg using 100% CPU (guess my machine wasn't fast enough to lock up). As per advice from the post of some other users I modified /etc/X11/xorg.conf and disabled the line RenderAccel. I believe this may of resolved the issue for me since Xorg is now using a reasonable percentage of CPU (less than 3%).

Hope this helps someone else :D

David

LXj · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Dec 2005 Posts: 107

I upgraded several things, most notably Xorg from 7.1 to 7.2 and started experiencing strange problems with some GTK apps (firefox and freeciv): when I run them, X starts to consume 85-100% cpu

arnuld · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Apr 2007 Posts: 124

but for me these are 2 kinds of problems:

# 1) when running "X" EVERYTHING just freezes. C-M-F2(3,4 rtc) does not work, it is locked, frozen, dead. you can not do anything to solve it the only option is to use "restart" button on Cabinet.

#2) exactly same as #1 but this time mouse moves, i mean mouse pointer does not freeze. but again, the solution is same as the #1.

on Arch, this problems occur 3 times day and on Gentoo it occurs 2-3 times a week. aaarghhh... my friends say that "Linux is same as Windows, it hangs and then you need reboot" :-(

i also had this problem on Arch: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=261187#p261187 but i never had it in Debian, nor i have it in CRUX,the one i use now.
_________________
arnuld
http://lispmachine.wordpress.com

wision · n00b Joined: 11 Jul 2007 Posts: 1

Hi!
I've got same problem as couple of guys here but noone seems to find a solution.. My xorg freezes when i change CPU frequency while i'm in X, but if i run xorg, switch back to console, change the frequency and go back to X, everything is fine and pc is working on other frequency. I use 2.6.20-r8 with ACPI support, xorg 7.2 and pentium4m as CPU. Any suggestions for solution?

billydv · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2007 3:47 pm Post subject:

I know this has been a problem for alot of us and its absolutely maddening but I may have found a solution (as crazy as that seems). I never had the problem on my first box, a socket a amd, but when I installed on a socket 939 with an x2 4200 the problems began, I have been experiencing lockups from the time I emerged gentoo-sources and compiled the kernel ,nvidia-drivers. Whats changed from the live-cd kernel to my config, The scheduler, from anticipatory which is the genkernel default I believe to the cfq which I also believe most of us select as desktop users. Now in the last couple of days I have compiled 3 kernels, One with the previous settings, server , cfq sheduler, no prempt kernel,discont memory, timer 250 -- This one freezes
next one has server , anticipatory scheduler, no preempt kernel, discont memory, timer 250 --no freezes left overnight nor any delays when resuming from screensaver

next one has desktop (not the low latency), anticipatory scheduler, preempt kernel, sparse memory, and timer 1000 --no freezes for 6hrs and I just did a test, copied 9 individual iso,s simultaneously over samba shares, ran revdep-rebuild and emerge glibc and all copies completed and revdep-rebuild completed with no problems before I canceled the glibc emerge and no problems, no need to restartx

I admit I know very little about all of this compared to many of the people having problems but look at the people on the nvidia forums that are having problems, the majority use distros where you compile your kernel (in ex gentoo) or ubuntu (default cfq scheduler). Its not long enough to be conclusive but I know that my results are so far repeatable. Please inform of any results you may come up with.
_________________
Billy DeVincentis

Joaquin24 · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 4:23 am Post subject:

Hi, just to prove my testimonial

compiled kernel like 30 times, varying different versions from 2.16.6 to 2.6.20 with desktop patchset's,

I have two machines one AM2 +3000, but that one didn't gave me so much trouble, however I didn't not run it heavily, as this has an early nforce mobo, the only kernel that supports this are 2.6.21 or higher so no quirks nor complain on that one, on the secondary Pc is where I ve done most compilations.

billydv · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 10:14 am Post subject:

Joaqin, I am curious as to what the kernel parameters that you set are, the ones that you mention in the previous post, the vm stuff for the nvidia cards? They arent in the kernel config, at least not that I can see.
_________________
Billy DeVincentis

billydv · Posted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 10:38 am Post subject:

Okay, I see that you can make the changes via the sysctl file in etc but what effect do you think these changes will have towards making xorg freeze less?
_________________
Billy DeVincentis

Joaquin24 · Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2007 2:18 am Post subject:

billydv · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:58 pm Post subject:

Okay, as I have been having the xorg lockups for a while and its a variable thing, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesnt, for starters, I realize I had alot of other small problems going on using up memory
1- A bad network cable was causing dhcpcd and syslog-ng to run nonstop and heavy cpu usage

2- Xorg.conf had numerous mistakes, I didnt realize until a kernel recompile was causing the keyboard to act funny, I ran X- configure and used that as a base to redo my xorg.conf

We'll see if it made much of a difference.
_________________
Billy DeVincentis

Joaquin24 · Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2007 2:07 am Post subject:

cillianderoiste · n00b Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 13 Location: London

I have experienced a lot of lock ups too, but have managed to fix them eventually. I've had pretty much the same issues before with another nvidia card and I have one system which never has these issues. To check if it's an issue with the nvidia driver you can look at your var/log/messages for Xid errors:
grep Xid /var/log/messages
Aug 6 15:17:06 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 16, Head 00000000 Count 00058a68
Aug 6 15:17:07 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 8, Channel 00000000
Aug 6 15:17:07 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 30, L1 -> L0
Aug 6 15:17:23 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 8, Channel 0000001e
Aug 6 15:17:23 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 30, L0 -> L0
Aug 6 15:17:24 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 16, Head 00000000 Count 00058c49
Aug 6 15:17:31 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 8, Channel 00000020
Aug 6 15:17:32 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 16, Head 00000000 Count 00058c4a
Aug 6 15:17:39 localhost NVRM: Xid (0002:00): 8, Channel 00000020
I have tried many many things to resolve it and I think it's stable now. The best thing is to check the nvidia forums for advice. What made the difference for me was having idle=poll as a kernel parameter (recommended for dual core, mine is amd64 X2). I rather forcefully disabled agpgart from the kernel but that didn't seem to make any difference.
Since my system is a laptop I also have:
in
/etc/modules.d/nvidia
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222" NVreg_Mobile=3

I think that disables a powersaving mode

and in xorg.conf:
Option "NvAGP" "1"

which is supposed to force nvidia's agp

These steps are not likely to work with every system so check the forums. I also had severe problems with 100.14.11 but 100.14.09 is fine and I run compiz-fusion as my window manager without further problems. Incidentally the problems I had most recently also occurred even with all hardware acceleration turned off and with a plain metacity session.

If you can log into your machine via ssh after it locks up and run nvidia-bug-report.sh that will give you lots of details. The best way to get help is to post this along with details of the error to the forums on http://www.nvnews.net. You may get a reply from someone in nvidia but you'll probably start off with lots of awkward options to try out. Nvidia's initial response will be to update your bios and kernel, although I don't believe I've come across anyone who that has worked for.

It is always an extremely annoying problem when you come up against it, on one system I gave up and bought another card which worked fine. Of course that isn't an option on a laptop.

Good luck!

DancesWithWords · Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:37 am Post subject: Re: X.org Lockups (part III)

DancesWithWords · Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:39 am Post subject: Re: X.org Lockups (part III)

Nerdanel · Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 5:53 pm Post subject:

As a person who has suffered considerable trouble with these lockups and tried pretty much everything, before finally discovering the real cause to be something I never thought of.

It may be your power source failing gradually.

For me the freezes appeared after I had replaced my motherboard. I suspected everything from coincident software updates/recompiles to BIOS settings to the northbridge fan providing inadequate cooling. I got rid of my problems for several months by replacing the northbridge fan with a better-conducting (and passive) one, but now I see it worked only because it reduced my computer's power use by one active fan. And after a few months the lockups were back worse than ever.

My Antec power source had probably been failing since the beginning, but it had taken time and a chance to a new motherboard until the power level had decreased enough to cause problems. The final clue was that I started to experience problems that my motherboard manual were usually caused by overclocking too much... but I wasn't overclocking at all. My system has been 100% stable for over six months now with a new power source, so I can definitely say the power source is something you need to keep in mind.

DancesWithWords · Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 12:23 am Post subject:

DarkMetatron · n00b Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 15

I only have this lockups when I use KDE. Now I use XFCE4 and the lockups are gone for good.

transient · l33t Joined: 13 Jan 2005 Posts: 759

DancesWithWords · Posted: Sun Aug 12, 2007 4:46 am Post subject: Re: X.org Lockups (part III)

Ainulindalë · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Paris, France.

I'm experiencing pretty much the same thing, with this configuration :

AMD64 3000
Ati Radeon 9200
Kernel 2.6.22-r2

I'm in ~amd64, and it worked pretty nicely until I updated the kernel to the .22 release. I think it's possible that at the time of the update, I switched from anticipatory to CFQ scheduler (which is the present state). I will try to change the option and see how it goes. I remember pretty surely having some problems with CFQ on earlier versions of the kernel, problems which forced me to switch scheduler.

Right now, whereas my configuration hasn't change a bit, it locks up on trivial operations (using a drop down menu), without any apparent reason, at unforeseeable times. It simply goes to 90-100% CPU usage, sometimes the mouse pointer is able to move, sometimes not, but it's usable by SSH. Though, it's impossible to kill xorg or to restart it, as it's in zombie state.

I'm not keen on the PSU hypothesis, as for my part, my system isn't that much demanding (two hard drives, one DVD drive, and an old video card).
_________________
Oooook !

st0ned · n00b Joined: 23 Jul 2003 Posts: 9

My system is now stable after adding maxcpus=1 as a kernel boot parameter. This is less than ideal however as I would prefer to make use of both CPUs

maartenlambrecht · Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:33 pm Post subject:

I think my topic is related to this one. It's located here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-575841.html
The error I get after running Xorg-x11 with or withouth kde is this one:

Ainulindalë · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 8 Location: Paris, France.

I tried yesterday to change from CFQ to Anticipatory : same result, it freezes (meaning Xorg goes to 100% CPU, mouse is moving but keyboard isn't usable) without any intervention, or pretty quickly if I try to use graphical widgets.

For example, last time it freezed was when I tried to launch a program with the basic menu of XFCE. It freezed while painting this menu.

I tried to append noapic acpi=off idle=poll to my kernel configuration yesterday night, and switched to 2.6.22-r3. I also pointed out that I had useless options in my .config : multiprocessing, support for multi-core (and multi-core scheduler), though I use a single core processor, which I removed. I'll see if it changes anything, but what I find strange is that this bug only showed itself when I migrated from 2.6.21 to 2.6.22.
_________________
Oooook !

VinzC

Hi.

Don't know if it's the right place for posting but here I am. I've run through the big upgrade expat+KDE 3.5.5 -> KDE 3.5.7. Now I'm facing strange lockups of X, i.e. it eats 100% CPU after a certain amount of time running the screensaver. The more I leave my machine inactive (with the screen saver running) the longer X consumes CPU but only *after* I unlock the screen.

I've been able to unlock the screen a couple of times since the last time it ate up CPU like this, maybe four or five times but I always noticed CPU activity was still high for a noticeable period of time - a few seconds, maybe 10-20 seconds. And when it locks up I can still switch to a text console and kill -9 X, which is my only option. Strangely enough I can see activity in Superkaramba applets (Aero-IO panel) and the clock in kicker ticking but I can't interact with the desktop.

The first time I saw X lock up I tried zapping it with Ctrl-Alt-BkSpace but then I couldn't even switch to a text console. I've had to SSH into the machine and kill X manually. Running /etc/init.d/xdm stop doesn't work either in such a case.

Does anyone have an idea on that really annoying problem?
_________________
Gentoo addict: tomorrow I quit, I promise!... Just one more emerge...
1739!