Arch Linux

XDarkAngelX

Member

Registered: 2014-01-08

Posts: 62

ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I am having an issue in my laptop where the X Server keep working fine but when I try to pass to the ttys I see only a black screen or what was displayed in the tty before it's display froze.
It seems this issue happens only when my system passes the 2Gib of used RAM(also it seems that by this point the system uses a bit of the swap memory)
I have passed the 2 Gib of used RAM by either playing a game or by just opening lots of programs to fill the memory.
This same issue seems to also happen once my system get resumed from hibernation.
I am using sddm and plasma 5 , also I use bumblebee  to switch between my Intel card and the Nvidia card.

Also once the ttys display get frozen sometimes when I switch between the ttys and X server it seems to cause kwin to crash..

anyone has any idea what could cause it ? or ideas how to further investigate the issue ?
** I wasn't sure to which category this issue is related as I have no idea what could be causing it so I posted it here.

Last edited by XDarkAngelX (2016-04-14 09:00:46)

x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Moving to Laptop Issues.

k1-801

Member

Registered: 2016-03-22

Posts: 7

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Having the same issue on Acer PB ENTF71BM-C231, but with lower memory border.
It all began after an update that also broke elantech touchpad (known) and heaphone plug detection on two different laptops with different soundards (pavucontrol marks as "unplugged" and requires manual switching).
Clean ArchLinux installation did not fix anything, so that's definetely not my own mistake.

Last edited by k1-801 (2016-03-22 18:58:02)

XDarkAngelX

Member

Registered: 2014-01-08

Posts: 62

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Having the same issue on Acer PB ENTF71BM-C231, but with lower memory border.
It all began after an update that also broke elantech touchpad (known) and heaphone plug detection on two different laptops with different soundards (pavucontrol marks as "unplugged" and requires manual switching).
Clean ArchLinux installation did not fix anything, so that's definetely not my own mistake.

I am curious what is the memory border for you ? around the 1Gib ?

k1-801

Member

Registered: 2016-03-22

Posts: 7

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I am curious what is the memory border for you ? around the 1Gib ?

A bit more than 700 MiB, while I have 1.84 MiB of RAM. And the swap gets used here.
Forgot to note, I use Arch x64, sddm and KDE 5, Intel integrated video, with standard i915 driver, no additional videocards or drivers used. After loading with no additional applications started, system and DE use 696 MiB of RAM, so running any application causes the TTY to freeze.
UPD: After disabling swap before logging into the sddm, it freezes after 1.06 GiB of used RAM (started QtCreator to fill some memory).
UPD 2: The memory border is not constant. Today the ttys got stuck after 819M.

Last edited by k1-801 (2016-03-24 09:31:50)

jesu

Member

Registered: 2013-03-21

Posts: 19

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Same issue here on Lenovo G50-70, 64 bits, KDE 5, Intel i915 driver, 8GiB RAM.
At first I thought this was related to running fullscreen applications. I had this problem everytime after running a game, for example (which also consumes a good amount of memory).
Now, after reading this post, I checked it can happen, appearently, after certain amount of memory is in use. I can't tell you exactly, but at least this occurs after 5.5 GiB are used. Also, 208 KiB have been swapped.
System is up to date BTW, though this has been happening since a couple of months.

Jkoer

Member

Registered: 2015-05-29

Posts: 3

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I have the same issue on a Gigabyte P34G v2, 8G RAM, Intel video drivers. I can't identify a specific memory threshold though. I tried incrementally filling up /tmp (goes to memory via tmpfs) with fallocate, and even with 6G (so quite a bit more than half) memory usage I could not trigger the bug.

n125

Member

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 38

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I think I have the same problem. If I exit X or switch to a tty using Ctrl + Alt + F#, I get a blank screen. I believe it started happening after some update in February or early March. The system isn't frozen because I can still input commands; I just can't see what's happening. I'm not sure if it's tied to memory usage though -- how are you monitoring that, so I can check?

jesu

Member

Registered: 2013-03-21

Posts: 19

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Hi n125.
I just started opening apps and checking with Ctrl+Alt+Fn the different ttys. After certain point, you can't see anymore the console content.

Jkoer

Member

Registered: 2015-05-29

Posts: 3

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

For me it sometimes just displays the output of tty1 (Xorg output) on tty2 - tty6, which are all frozen, but the X session on tty1 still works fine.

jesu

Member

Registered: 2013-03-21

Posts: 19

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Same for me. In fact, it displays the last thing was displayed on a tty before the problem happens.

n125

Member

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 38

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Same here: sometimes instead of a blank screen on all ttys, I see whatever was displayed on tty1, which is usually the startup output of X.

I guess I should mention that I'm also running an integrated Intel GPU with the standard i915 driver.

Anyway, here is a small log of my memory usage across three days. One sample per day. The issue started happening again on the third day.

#1
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        8098712      737304     6475004      120536      886404     7168900
Swap:             0           0           0

#2
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        8098712      957848     5124112      265488     2016752     6799072
Swap:             0           0           0

#3
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        8098712      725500     1877540      169644     5495672     7131028
Swap:             0           0           0

alanxoc3

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 17

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I'm having the same problem .
Running an ASUS x205ta, I only see whatever was on tty1. I can enter commands, but the display is frozen. This only started happening today, after I did system upgrade. I'm using Gnome 3. Maybe it is on xorg bug.

n125

Member

Registered: 2011-12-30

Posts: 38

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

So far everyone here with this problem seems to be running integrated Intel graphics.

I'm having the same problem .
Running an ASUS x205ta, I only see whatever was on tty1. I can enter commands, but the display is frozen. This only started happening today, after I did system upgrade. I'm using Gnome 3. Maybe it is on xorg bug.

Do you remember if there were any video-related packages that were updated? If there's only one or two then it might help pinpointing the culprit.

alanxoc3

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 17

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xf86-input-libinput (0.16.0-1 -> 0.17.0-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xf86-video-intel (1:2.99.917+519+g8229390-1 -> 1:2.99.917+587+gc186d4d-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xf86-video-openchrome (0.3.3-6 -> 0.4.0-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xf86-video-r128 (6.10.0-2 -> 6.10.1-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server-common (1.18.0-4 -> 1.18.3-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server (1.18.0-4 -> 1.18.3-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-server-xwayland (1.18.0-4 -> 1.18.3-1)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-xinit (1.3.4-3 -> 1.3.4-4)
[2016-04-05 16:57] [ALPM] upgraded xorg-xrandr (1.4.3-1 -> 1.5.0-1)

from /var/log/pacman.log
There is what would have affected it from my upgrade.
I'm going to try downgrading the video-intel, see if that changes anything.

Edit:
Actually, that didn't work, downgrading intel. It seemed like it worked for a bit, but my tty froze now

Last edited by alanxoc3 (2016-04-07 19:42:57)

hellwalker

Member

Registered: 2011-05-13

Posts: 8

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I have the same problem here on my Samsung NP270E5G, with Intel i915 video driver.

Edit:
My journalctl -r output: http://pastebin.com/WANGg9Qc looks like systemd is stopping tty, but I don't know why. And here http://pastebin.com/uL7BvhwF my dmesg output.

Last edited by hellwalker (2016-04-08 03:20:03)

sitquietly

Member

From: On the Wolf River

Registered: 2010-07-12

Posts: 219

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Moving to Laptop Issues.

May be not a laptop issue...

I have a fresh install on a Intel-based desktop system with 16GB of memory.  One of the first things I noticed after getting LightDM/Gnome3 running yesterday was that console support was broken.  Trying to switch to a tty from Gnome would sometimes give a black screen, sometimes I got a login prompt only to be switched to another tty mid-login, scrolling output on a tty froze and not even root could regain control of that console, returning to X from a console would sometimes do strange things including logging out.  I checked the links in /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants and looked at getty config files -- everything seemed ok (I switched to FreeBSD when Arch started using systemd so my knowledge of systemd configuration is weak).

After reading this thread and some helpful pointers I made two changes and my problem went away...  I'm sorry that I have no diagnostics to share I just changed things and got a better result:

1. I installed intel-ucode and rebooted with updated microcode for my Sandybridge i5.
2. I removed LightDM and switched to GDM.

Now, with GDM, the console behavior is different -- I get the GDM display manager running on tty1, my X session (gnome) running on tty2 (LightDM had put my X session on tty7), and my consoles available on tty3 and above.  There is no longer any delay in switching back and forth between X and consoles and no strange behavior.  I tried to lock up a console by running a long process scrolling tens of thousands of lines of output while I repeatedly switched back and forth between that console and X; there was no problem.  I'll keep checking the console behavior (naturally, since I use the console a lot) and report any further insights.

n0rdik0

Member

Registered: 2010-04-30

Posts: 3

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Same here with two systems, both intel: X200s (GMA950, 4GB RAM) and T440s (4200U, 12GB RAM). Tried playing with the tty services, didn't help, definitely related to kernel/xorg drivers.

alanxoc3

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 17

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

I'm going to try downgrading my recently updated xorg packages, see if that works.

Sitquietly, I already have intel ucode installed on my netbook, and I don't use (or plan on using) a display manager. So your fix probably won't work for me.

k1-801

Member

Registered: 2016-03-22

Posts: 7

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Today I've tried to fill memory running the program showed below without logging into DE, and nothing happened even after fullfilling RAM and 3 of 4 GiB of swap - the tty's were still working fine, so the problem is not related to RAM. And there are no available microcode updates.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <memory.h>
#include <stdint.h>

int main()
{
        uint64_t mem = 0;
        while(1)
        {
                malloc(1024*1024);
                printf("Loaded: %i MiB\n", ++mem);
                for(int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i); // It's just a small delay - increase or decrease for your machine to have required memory filling speed
        }
}

alanxoc3

Member

Registered: 2015-09-03

Posts: 17

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

Yeah, mine seems to be semi random. Sometimes it freezes once I start up x, and sometimes it doesn't freeze for an hour or so.

XDarkAngelX

Member

Registered: 2014-01-08

Posts: 62

Re: ttys display keep getting frozen [SOLVED]

It seems with after the latest updates recently the problem seems to be resolved , just opened  civ 5 on the my laptop and the tty's stayed ok and before it would have guaranteed the tty's to freeze.
From what I read in another thread it seems that the updated kerenl 4.5.0-1 resolve the issue as the guy there only updated the kernel.

Last edited by XDarkAngelX (2016-04-14 08:59:45)