System freeze during emerge. Ack.

yinrunning · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 6:38 pm Post subject: System freeze during emerge. Ack.

Ok, Preface: I haven't used Gentoo in a couple of years. Or any distro for that matter. However, I'm starting a job on the 21st in an all-Gentoo environment - which is awesome but kinda scary - so I'm trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Most things are coming back pretty quickly, and I'm very excited about all the advancements I can see so far. However, just as usual, I've run into a problem I don't know how to approach.

So, the Problem: System has been up for a couple of days. I've succesfully installed fluxbox, gdm, and a couple of other minor things. I was about to start looking into file and icon managers and install some themes to play with but my new boss uses Kate and I wanted to get familiar with that first. In the middle of the Kate emerge, however, Whammy - power blip reboots the system. That's pretty much where it started.

Well, it rebooted just fine. Got back into flux, decided to go for a firefox install so I could browse docs online without switching into Win. That went fine. Firefox is up. So, all excited about that, did the Kate emerge again before leaving for work. Came back, and the system was completely frozen. I could still see the desktop, and I could still see the mouse. I couldn't switch into another terminal session or do anything else with the keyboard, and the mouse was stuck in cursor, not pointer (it had been hovering over an xterm window). I've tried two additional Kate emerges. Both times the system froze, black screen, couldn't see a thing. I tried an "emerge --update world", same result.

So, I currently have "emerge Kate > Kate_emerge" running in xterm. I figure if it freezes again I can at least see what the heck it was doing. I also did "dmesg > dmesg" before starting it. We'll see what happens. If anyone has any ideas of how to either fix this or avoid it in future, I'd love to hear them. Thanks much.

120! · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Switzerland

I just started to have the same problem with nvidia-kernel and grub, after upgrading to portage-2.0.53_rc7. Never happened before. I'll try to investigate when I have a bit of time, but didn't find any solution by now (but manual install :cry:

).

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

Hi,

you could check your temperatures.
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yinrunning · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 9:00 pm Post subject: update

Ok, this time it worked. No freeze. So now I'm worried that this has nothing to do with emerge, and that it's possibly a kernel issue.

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

I think then it should be a a hardware issue, nothing to do with kernel or something. Try to test your ram (memtest86) and your cpu (mprime), and look at the temps. It should be one of that...

yinrunning · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 10:43 pm Post subject:

thanks for the suggestion. Problem is I don't seem to have those commands. I also don't seem to have "locate" or "updatedb". Is there a package of base utils that I can grab for this kind of sutff? I seem to remember something along those lines, but no idea what it's called.

yinrunning · Posted: Sun Nov 13, 2005 11:51 pm Post subject:

So, I found the problem: Turns out that the PS/2 port on my board has for some unkown reason become so loose that jiggling the cord at all will disconnect the keyboard. When that happens in the middle of a Linux session: Goodbye and thank you for playing.

So, it's off to the store to find a USB keyboard. doh.

120! · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Switzerland

no hope in my case ... well, probably not a temperature problem since I updated 73 other packages in a row and without any problem. And whether I try to install nvidia-kernel or grub, I obtain invariably the same freeze in the beginning of the merging phase. Will see what happens if I revert back to portage 2.0.51.22-r3...

120! · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Switzerland

went fine with 2.0.51.22-r3.

yinrunning · Posted: Mon Nov 14, 2005 1:32 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I'm beginning to suspect that it might be more complicated than just the keyboard. That might've been a red herring. It's definitely causing a temporary system halt when it wiggles loose, but I've had four freezes in a row during emerge nvu with noone in the room and definitely not even breathing on the keyboard.

Gonna check my versioning after work. Anyone have a quick "read here" for rolling back? I've never done it before.

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

memtest86 is a memory testing tool which has to been started via a bootable iso, which can be downloaded.
mprime is a linux tool for participating in the gimps project, which tries to find huge prime digits. But it is also _the_ programm for stresstesting.

memtest: http://www.memtest86.com/
mprime: ftp://mersenne.org/gimps/mprime2414.tar.gz