Gnome 2.18 unstable

JoelCogen · Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 7:17 pm Post subject: Gnome 2.18 unstable

Hi all,

I'm quiet new to Gentoo and although I am very pleased with the way things are going so far, I'm experiencing severe instability, but I'm not sure about what's causing it.
I'm running Gnome 2.18 with Xorg 7.2, nvidia-drivers 100.14.09 (geForce 8600M), on an Asus F3SV.

I get two kinds of crashes:

:arrow:

Sometimes, when I hit the Gnome power button and the confirm, the computer freezes. I'm forced to shut down manually. This never append (yet?) when I type poweroff or restart in a terminal or when I shut down from Enlightenment (E17, but I don't use it that much), and it's not the most frequent crash. I usually get it when I'm emerging new stuff and rebuilding the kernel, but when everything is up to date it seems to append less (maybe I reboot less, too...)

:arrow:

More often, I get a partially-black screen and loose control of keyboard and mouse (pointer moves but no click) when I play around too much with Gnome/gdm. By playing around I mean: locking the screen (I had to disable auto-locking when closing the lid because I could NEVER get back to gnome after re-opening my laptop), switching users, switching to tty1, 2, 3, ... (sometimes switching to tty works, but getting back to tty7 results in a crash)

The first is not that important since it only appends when I shut down, but you can realize the second is very annoying.
No more than one hour ago it crashed because the screensaver started fading in and then I moved the mouse, resulting in a partially-faded-out screen. I still had mouse control so I clicked shut down in Gnome: bad idea, resulting in a freeze, 6 secs on the power button and...

So, if you have any idea on why I get these problems....

Thanks

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Joel Cogen

EvilFurby · Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:46 pm Post subject:

I'm also suffering from Gnome instability issues on my Toshiba X200-20S. I'm running the same nvidia drivers with my 8700M.

When I load up Gnome the clock(top right) and associated panel icons fails to load. The mouse cursor moves but the menus are not responsive or fails to exit gnome when requested.

I've also had some kernel stability issues which makes me this its related to my compiler options.

For 64bit my CFLAGS contains -march nocona. There is -march core2 in GCC 4.3 but that is not available yet. I'd be interested to know what you have CFLAGS set to.

JoelCogen · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 8:46 am Post subject:

Hi,

CFLAGS="-march=nocona -O2 -pipe"

I mostly followed the advises in the AMD64 Handbook to choose them...
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Joel Cogen

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

First thing to check with 'erratic' lockups that happen more often during compiling or other heavy use should probably be a memtest.

EvilFurby · Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 5:19 pm Post subject:

My RAM checks out ok and I have had no problems compiling packages. What I have noticed is that the gnome problems seems to appear when the configuration is changed from the default (ie putting icons on the top bar and/or adding panel applets). Not sure if this is related or not.

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

But it's erratic right? (ie if you do something and get a segfault, then do exactly the same again you don't?)

Any overlays/custom ebuilds? CFLAGS? (actually, emerge --info would be handy)

Tried a revdep-rebuild, in case of dependancy issues (though they shouldn't cause an *erratic* problem)

JoelCogen · Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2007 2:08 pm Post subject:

Personally, I have erratic and none-erratic problems:

- I get 2 crashes no matter what: when I try to launch cups from Gnome's services panel (I have to run cupsd from a terminal) and when I click "connect to another wireless network" in NetworkManager. I can leave with that, but it might give some interesting info...

- I get erratic crashes when I switch user, lock screen, switch to tty1...6, etc.

- I get erratic freezes when I shut down or reboot from Gnome

emerge --info :

EvilFurby · Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 8:07 pm Post subject:

I solved my problems by disabling software sound mixing (ESD). Gnome now runs stable for me.

Dr.Impossible · Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 4:38 am Post subject:

I'm having similar problems with the gnome panel. My configuration is really close to that of JoelCogen's. In fact, it was really bad until I disabled SMP NUMA support in my kernel (I have no idea why it was enabled in the first place). gnome-panel will randomly crash for me if I do too many things at once in Rhythmbox or play around with Gnome's menus or preference pages a little too much.

Actually, last time gnome-panel crashed for me I tried clicking on a launcher button in the gnome panel that opens gnome-terminal. The menus, buttons and clock in the gnome panel stopped responding, but some of the applets (notably, Weather Report and Notification Area) continued working normally. I was able to switch to another screen and kill gnome-panel with top, at which point it automatically reloaded and everything worked fine after.

I'm going to try disabling ESD to see if that solves the problem for me.

JoelCogen · Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 7:34 pm Post subject:

Ok, I have one question for people who have the same problem: do you all run dual-core cpus ? Because I'm looking in the kernel and I see stuff like "suspend on SMP (EXPERIMENTAL)", and the NUMA thing (which was enabled for me), and so I'm thinking maybe gnome is messing up because of all not-so-stable smp features.

I'm compiling without NUMA right now, I'll see if there's any change...
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Joel Cogen

Dr.Impossible · Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 3:25 am Post subject:

I'm running an amd64 build on a Intel Core 2 Duo. As far as I know, this processor doesn't support NUMA, so it should be disabled in the kernel (even though it's enabled by default apparently).

It's been nearly a week since I turned off ESD, and that seems to have solved the stability issues in gnome-panel so far. But, now totem will sometimes crash when playing a song and vlc will sometimes refuse to produce any sound at all.