Arch Linux

musasabi

Member

From: Chicago, IL

Registered: 2011-06-23

Posts: 63

Gnome/GDM/Xorg crash?

I've got this really strange crash. Every once in a while, Gnome will simply blink out of existence, falling back to GDM. Not sure what's going on there, but the same apparent behavior presents when I attempt to lock my machine with Meta+L. The screen goes black, and instead of the monitor going into standby, I'm greeted with a fresh GDM login prompt. When I log back in, every application/window that was up is gone, and that's that.

I tried looking into journalctl for something, and got the following clue:

Oct 31 07:43:08 blendtec systemd[1]: Created slice User Slice of gdm.
Oct 31 07:43:08 blendtec systemd-logind[379]: New session c1 of user gdm.
Oct 31 07:43:08 blendtec systemd[1]: Started Session c1 of user gdm.
Oct 31 07:43:08 blendtec systemd[456]: pam_unix(systemd-user:session): session opened for user gdm by (uid=0)
Oct 31 07:44:05 blendtec gdm-password][664]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session opened for user patrick by (uid=0)
Nov 02 11:47:48 blendtec gdm-password][664]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session closed for user patrick
Nov 02 11:47:56 blendtec gdm-password][15543]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session opened for user patrick by patrick(uid=0)
Nov 02 12:04:05 blendtec gdm-password][15543]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session closed for user patrick
Nov 02 12:04:11 blendtec gdm-password][19782]: pam_unix(gdm-password:session): session opened for user patrick by patrick(uid=0)

So the narrative is... Oct 31st, I must've had my machine powered off in the morning. Not sure.

Nov 02 (today) at 11:47, the running Gnome session crashed, dropping me back to GDM after 12 seconds.

Nov 02 at 12:04, I pressed Meta+L to lock the machine, as an illustration for this post.

I don't know where to look next for evidence, and this behavior has persisted for quite a few weeks, now, so I've lost hope that a quick patch will filter down from upstream. As always, any help is appreciated.