Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

Californian · 2014-03-26 00:28:55

Hello all,

I've been using Arch for a few weeks now, and since installing on my laptop last week I've run into a rather annoying problem. Every hour or two, the system completely freezes with the hdd access light solidly on, and I can do either nothing or move my mouse a little. When this happens, the power button almost never works (except when held for several seconds to kill it), though under normal circumstances it does. Very rarely, waiting around for a few minutes the system will come back, but then only until what I think must be the next write to disk (so a few more minutes max). I've looked at numerous other posts on these forums, and they all have some sort of indication of an error in one log or another, however going through all of mine I see none. I checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log, dmesg, journalctl and I installed smartctl and ran it, but got no error there either ("No errors logged" and "Vendor test" "completed without error"). I can paste any of these logs as deemed useful. I also changed the hdparm setting referenced in the wiki to -B 199 (though I had it initially to whatever made it park only on shutdown and still had this problem). Any ideas for what might be wrong/what I might try? Thanks in advance!

EDIT 1: So I tried running iotop and have my windows a little transparent so I could see through chrome and it had the top 10-20 programs listed as 99% io, but no write just like 10s of MB/s read.

EDIT 2: I forgot to mention something else that might be very useful information: I can also not access the other TTYs.

Last edited by Californian (2014-03-26 04:40:41)

Algernop · 2014-03-26 14:56:16

Does it hang too when you purposefully copy a large file?

MadTux · 2014-03-26 16:05:14

I would also suggest to run top or htop in a shell, just to see if the problem is caused by a particular process. Did you notice any pattern behind the problem, e.g. always occurs if a particular program is run or a particular action is performed?

Californian · 2014-03-26 22:55:00

The only (gui) applications I run are Chrome and urxvt. When looking at top, Chrome always eats up a high percentage of the cpu relative to everything else (though split across several processes), but it definitely does tend to happen when a particularly resource-heavy page loads, or when I accidentally open several tabs at once (such as all the tabs from another device). If I leave my laptop on overnight with everything running, it seems to not have a problem usually. Also, when I try to install a large package, such as ttf-google-fonts-git, it seems to hang then as well. I don't have any large files now, but I'll torrent the Arch iso and try copying that and see what happens.

Algernop · 2014-03-27 10:19:41

Ok, I recall having a similar issue (albeit only caused by heavy io and not much else) on an older system of mine. Changing the io scheduler proved to be beneficial.

Californian · 2014-03-28 00:05:30

Wow MadTux, thank you so much you totally saved my buttocks. I finally got a chance to run top just before it went all freeze-y and the top-used command was not, in fact, Chrome at that point, but kswapd0 or something like that. Which then jogged my memory that I never actually bothered mounting my swap partition, because since I used btrfs on my other comp, I forgot that when using ext4 for this one it might be a good idea lol. So I mounted my swap partition and added it to fstab and haven't had any complete lockups since.

However, it still does a short-lived freezing when it would previously have permanently frozen, so I'm wondering if your suggestion, Algernop, might help me. How should I go about evaluating the scheduler options, and are they configurable? I am currently using cfq.

Any idea why kswapd0 would be blocking everything else from running while it is running?

Algernop · 2014-03-28 09:52:27

As far as I know they are not configurable but can be changed without the need for rebooting, since there are only three you could just test them individually.

# echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

etc.

HOWEVER, this io scheduler theory is beginning to sound a little far fetched since kswapd0 apparently produces a plethora of issues, like
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=144702

Arch Linux

#1 2014-03-26 00:28:55

Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

#2 2014-03-26 14:56:16

Re: Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

#3 2014-03-26 16:05:14

Re: Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

#4 2014-03-26 22:55:00

Re: Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

#5 2014-03-27 10:19:41

Re: Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

#6 2014-03-28 00:05:30

Re: Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

#7 2014-03-28 09:52:27

Re: Laptop Hard Drive (HDD) Access and System Freeze Problem

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