Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

icetonic · 2011-10-31 21:46:11

For some days already it occurs to me that the system just completely freezes and locks up. Neither keyboard nor mouse accept input, the screen freezes, the sound stutters, and even SysRq combinations do not work.

I tried to look for strange log entries but found nothing suspicious (but frankly, I don't really know what to look for)

The weird thing is that these freezes seem to happen randomly on some mouse movement... when watching movies with VLC nothing ever happens for hours. But when I e.g. return to do something and start moving the cursor, sometimes the freeze just happens.

First I thought it may be a problem with my new graphics card and/or the nvidia driver... Cause in XMonad I could often reproduce the freeze when doing some heavy photo manipulations in GIMP (but it seems the reason is the cursor movement, not the graphics load, and also as I said, VLC etc works fine).

Now I tried to revert to OpenBox as window manager for a day. And, oh wonder, I tried everything, but I had not a single freeze with it...! oO

Could it really be XMonad that is causing such a heavy system freeze? My intuition says its a hardware issue, but the lack of failures with OpenBox seems to contradict this...

I'm using a dual head setup using TwinView with the proprietary nvidia driver with a GT520.

Here are my xmonad configuration files which worked fine for weeks...

Thanks in advance for suggestions

hellomynameisphil · 2011-11-01 01:59:51

I have been having similar problems while using Xmonad! I am not sure if there is a correlation. Sometimes it seems to occur shortly after making a change to my config and re{compiling,starting}. Sometimes it seems random.

I haven't played much with other window managers, but it does seem to be something that happens while using xmonad-darcs. Of course, I am using xmonad almost all the time, so I don't have much basis for comparison.

I also cannot ssh into my computer when it freezes like this.

I worried that it was a hardware issue, but I wonder if I should consider other possibilities...

icetonic · 2011-11-01 20:15:23

Good to know I'm not completely alone with this weird problem

Does really no one have an idea what's going on there?

I really like XMonad and after spending a lot of time making it my perfect WM I really don't like the idea that I might have to look for something else just beacuse of this stupid weirdness ((

linux-ka · 2011-11-01 21:39:59

I am running XMonad every day on several machines, but I have never had a system freeze or similar heavy issues.

Are you using the current version of XMonad? I got all my haskell stuff directly from cabal, which includes mainly Xmonad, Xmonad-contrib and xmobar.

Maybe there is kind of issue due to wrong dependencies within the AUR/pacman package-base. Just upgrade via cabal, and try the new binary. Maybe this helps.

icetonic · 2011-11-02 16:08:12

I always used the "stable" xmonad and xmonad-contrib...

Now I installed xmonad-darcs and xmonad-contrib-darcs (which also is more up-to-date) and the problem seems to be gone, for now

Well, this is strange, but I hope it stays fixed ..

linux-ka · 2011-11-02 16:13:36

Try to use those from cabal directly. This will be more healthy for your system anyway. I had lots of trouble using haskell stuff from other sources. They could hardly resolve the dependencies.

But if a new version already helped, that's fine.

archtaku · 2011-11-04 04:31:21

This started happening for me recently but xmonad hasn't been updated since late June. I'm using the stable version from the community repo.

None of my logs show any errors, it's bizarre. This has happened both on my netbook running the intel video driver, and workstation running the open source radeon driver.

nexus7 · 2011-11-04 14:13:19

linux-ka wrote:

Try to use those from cabal directly. This will be more healthy for your system anyway. I had lots of trouble using haskell stuff from other sources. They could hardly resolve the dependencies.

So to prevent eventual freezes: Should one do something else than (re)install xmonad-darcs(-contrib/-extras) when there's an updated pkgbuild? If so, what?

linux-ka · 2011-11-04 14:32:03

well, in my case I uninstalled xmonad(-contrib) via pacman ans installed with cabal directly.

cabal update
cabal install xmonad
cabal install xmonad-contrib

That's all. It is more than robust, because of pacman-(core,extra,community,AUR)-independent dependencies. Everything necessary will be installed via cabal. Further, this will never be affected by updates/upgrades from pacman. At least as far as I know.

Scince you just do this as normal user, the binary will be kept in $HOME/.cabal/bin/ . Don't forget.

nexus7 · 2011-11-04 14:43:17

Ah, sounds good!
So, you won't also need darcs or some kind of xmonad dummy-package, just cabal-install from the extra-repo, right?

linux-ka · 2011-11-04 14:55:02

That's the case :-)

nexus7 · 2011-11-04 15:12:46

Cheers, mate!
I'll switch to it soon.

owain · 2011-11-05 01:55:34

I too had this, a week or so ago - several times over a couple of days. However, things seems to be OK now, so perhaps there was another update in the pipeline that was involved *does the non-superstitious equivalent of touching wood*.

Given how big the Haskell community seems to be within Arch Linux, I'm surprised by the number of recommendations for avoiding Arch packaging...anyone more knowledgeable than me about such things (not hard) care to explain?

nexus7 · 2011-11-05 02:44:28

owain wrote:

Given how big the Haskell community seems to be within Arch Linux, I'm surprised by the number of recommendations for avoiding Arch packaging...

It's got nothing to do with blaming the packaging in general, but more with things one likes to do with xmonad. Also installing It the Arch way or 'from source' is IMHO rather a question of taste (and experience), similar to the case with TeXLive.

Using the official packages is a good starting point, but the more one gets involved, it gives a thrill to use the darcs versions' stuff, or go even 'beyond', say, going the 'cabal way' -- though I don't know if the latter is more bleeding edge (haven't yet changed to it anyway) and ntl must confess not know where to draw the lines here. But we shouldn't go too much off topic by debating principles.

However, it just should be considered, xm'darcs might be unstable. -- But if there's something wrong with the official xmonad packages, this must be fixed quickly of course.

cppkhartna · 2011-11-05 13:39:37

Hi! I've had the same very problem running xmonad on arch x86_64 recently. I thought it was kind of kernel upgrade issue - it started the day after upgrading it from 3.0.6 to 3.0.7. I downgraded it and everything has been working smoothly since then. I also tried to upgrade again, but freezing persisted, though more seldom. So downgrade was the only option that helped me. After bumping into this topic, I began wondering, why Had you upgraded your kernel before it started, too?

egan · 2011-11-05 21:28:25

I've had this problem too, it seems to be certain combinations of linux and Xorg that cause it because my xmonad install hasn't been updated in months. I'm on x86_64 and Intel integrated graphics (2nd gen i5). After an update last week it stopped happening. It's hard to tell which update, because various Xorg stuff, intel-dri, and linux-firmware have been updated in that interval.

lifeafter2am · 2011-11-06 02:37:31

Everything's still chugging along here just fine.

icetonic · 2011-11-06 12:10:38

Okay, I tried the darcs version from the repo and also the cabal install version... Both of them do freeze for me, but not as often as the normal package..

Well, seems like I'll have to wait for another Xorg and/or kernel update...

listdata · 2011-11-07 00:15:29

I had this problem several weeks ago (I remember because full system freezes are an exotic rarity in Xmonad!); for me it was crashing because my USB thumb drive was plugged in for several hours. I stopped leaving my USB drives plugged in all the time and the issue went away. Whatever was causing the crashes, it was X (or some other low-level backend), not Xmonad...

archtaku · 2011-11-07 00:29:54

I agree, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with xmonad itself.

icetonic · 2011-11-07 20:52:07

If that is true, why is xmonad the only window manager where the problems, whereever they may truly be, are showing symptoms, i.e. the freezing?

Oh, snap... I remember something similar happening to me with Fluxbox about 4 years ago... Thats when I first tried OpenBox, which (like now!) does not have this problem..

Well, ok, it may be not only xmonad, but its a kind of unfortunate coincidence or some specific usage of the X API... otherwise it makes no sense to me oO

Haptic · 2011-11-07 21:13:12

The freezes happens with dwm to me as well. I don't know if its coincidence (probably is since a lot of stuff as been updated since), but the freezes have been less often with dwm than xmonad.

linux-ka · 2011-11-07 21:30:34

Well, if this should be a problem due to xmonad, more xmonad users should face this problem. I don't. As mentioned, I run xmonad on three different machines and I've never seen this issue. It might be a strange problem on those specific machines, but not really within xmonad. Maybe some drivers should be checked (?) .

lifeafter2am · 2011-11-08 00:03:38

I'm with linux-ka; I run Xmonad on two different machines and have no issues with freezes. Both are fully updated systems with NVIDIA graphics cards.

ibid · 2011-11-08 05:03:10

I'm getting this issue with xmonad as well. I wish I could correlate it to some specific date, but for a long time I thought it was being caused by flash, so I ignored it.

I did a fresh install on my atom/ion box, installed from cabal. Today I've had at least 3 freezes. Symptoms similar to those posted above: total loss of all input.

No trouble in fluxbox.

Last edited by ibid (2011-11-08 05:03:48)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-10-31 21:46:11

Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#2 2011-11-01 01:59:51

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#3 2011-11-01 20:15:23

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#4 2011-11-01 21:39:59

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#5 2011-11-02 16:08:12

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#6 2011-11-02 16:13:36

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#7 2011-11-04 04:31:21

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#8 2011-11-04 14:13:19

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#9 2011-11-04 14:32:03

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#10 2011-11-04 14:43:17

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#11 2011-11-04 14:55:02

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#12 2011-11-04 15:12:46

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#13 2011-11-05 01:55:34

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#14 2011-11-05 02:44:28

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#15 2011-11-05 13:39:37

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#16 2011-11-05 21:28:25

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#17 2011-11-06 02:37:31

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#18 2011-11-06 12:10:38

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#19 2011-11-07 00:15:29

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#20 2011-11-07 00:29:54

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#21 2011-11-07 20:52:07

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#22 2011-11-07 21:13:12

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#23 2011-11-07 21:30:34

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#24 2011-11-08 00:03:38

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

#25 2011-11-08 05:03:10

Re: Xmonad causes full system freezes randomly?

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