Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

Slax · 2010-09-11 09:34:39

Every two hours or so, my Arch will crash with only the ability to move the mouse.
No keyboard hooks work, even an attempt to switch to VC1 to check Xorg messages.

I'm running an i7 720Q, nvidia 240M with nouveaux drivers and dwm on xorg 1.8.

I checked /var/log/messages.log and noticed that the kernel did log me pulling out my usb mouse after one of the crashes, so something is still working.
This same type of crash happened to me on Linux Mint.

Also, my memory usage on boot to dwm is 600mb. This is worse even than my Windows 7 install! I'll keep my number of threads to a minimum and also ask here how I can reduce my memory usage.

Last edited by Slax (2010-09-11 10:28:31)

xvello · 2010-09-11 10:28:34

In these situations, it's a 99,9% chance you xorg server crashed. That is why your kernel still works. Xorg crashes are tricky to understand, but you can ssh from another machine to try debugging it.

Slax · 2010-09-11 12:03:07

It just happened again. Luckily, I have open-ssh running.

What am I looking for?

IncredibleLaser · 2010-09-11 12:06:37

Also, my memory usage on boot to dwm is 600mb. This is worse even than my Windows 7 install! I'll keep my number of threads to a minimum and also ask here how I can reduce my memory usage.

Since when is it good to have little data in RAM? As long as you don't run out of it, there's no problem. I don't even have a swap partition and never cared about memory usage.

Slax · 2010-09-11 12:18:13

IncredibleLaser wrote:

Also, my memory usage on boot to dwm is 600mb. This is worse even than my Windows 7 install! I'll keep my number of threads to a minimum and also ask here how I can reduce my memory usage.
Since when is it good to have little data in RAM? As long as you don't run out of it, there's no problem. I don't even have a swap partition and never cared about memory usage.

With this Arch Install I didn't setup a swap file either, because I thought 4GB was enough.

However, I'll be doing some eigendecomposition on this machine of very large matricies (100,000 x 100,000)+ and RAM is quickly and completely filled.

I hoped that with dwm and arch, I could have a system running in under 100mb, but that's not the case. Also, I have to get the bottom of this crashing issue before I start any computations.

Last edited by Slax (2010-09-11 12:19:22)

schen · 2010-09-11 12:20:26

Perhaps it's something to do with nouveau. Try out the nvidia drivers.

T-Dawg · 2010-09-11 13:29:24

schen wrote:

Perhaps it's something to do with nouveau. Try out the nvidia drivers.

Yes, they are very flaky. Try nvidia or vesa or just try dropping down to console mode without X and leave it and see if it crashes. You could also try the UBCD and running memory tests and/or hard drive tests.

Frood · 2010-09-11 14:41:49

Slax wrote:

Also, my memory usage on boot to dwm is 600mb. This is worse even than my Windows 7 install! I'll keep my number of threads to a minimum and also ask here how I can reduce my memory usage.

600 MB seems much for just dwm; I use 245 with firefox and thunderbird running in wmii right now. I only have 1 GB of ram though, don't know if that matters.

Are you sure that 600 MB is your actual memory usage and not including memory used by buffers and cache, i.e. the second line in the output of free?

Soumyadeep · 2010-09-11 17:04:20

i had random Xorg freezes with nouveau in ubuntu/kubuntu/mint, and so never tried nouveau on arch. You should try the binary drivers. I have seen that if the memory available is more(in ur case 4gb), the os does cache a lot on ram, this should not be ur primary concern unless X is leaking.

Slax · 2010-09-13 23:54:30

Haven't had the problem since switching back to the nvidia binary drivers. I suppose nouveau has some things to figure out with 200M series cards.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-11 09:34:39

Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#2 2010-09-11 10:28:34

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#3 2010-09-11 12:03:07

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#4 2010-09-11 12:06:37

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#5 2010-09-11 12:18:13

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#6 2010-09-11 12:20:26

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#7 2010-09-11 13:29:24

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#8 2010-09-11 14:41:49

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#9 2010-09-11 17:04:20

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

#10 2010-09-13 23:54:30

Re: Arch crashes with no ability to switch consoles.

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