Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

skottish · 2009-02-19 05:32:54

Basically what's happening is occasionally when logging out, restarting, or rebooting from an X session, I get a total system freeze. The screen goes blank and there's no input possible. I'm not seeing anything in the logs. The card is using the xf86-video-intel driver and used to work fine with the i810 driver.

There are some similar threads around like this one:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=65469

but it's still somewhat different. For me it only happens occasionally and I lose complete control of the system. This was happening when starting from GDM, and is now happening from starting either with 'exec startlxde' or 'exec ck-launch-session startlxde' (current). GDM is gone now (Hurray! Whoopy! Yahoo!)

One of the solutions listed in the above thread was to remove the vga= line from the kernel command in menu.lst. I don't have that. Another solution was to add it. I didn't try it yet. If this were the problem, wouldn't the behavior be consistent?

It's worth mentioning for a bunch of attempts yesterday I couldn't log in with startx, and I was getting a number of different errors in Xorg.0.log. Today it's working. I have no idea why; It's the same xorg.conf and same software as before.

I'm out of ideas. Got any?

skottish · 2009-02-22 15:57:52

I really could use some ideas with this. The machine in question isn't in my possession very often and it needs to 'just work'. I've since removed everything from lxde except for the panel and am now using a straight openbox session.

The machine only blanks when shutting down, logging out, or restarting. I do have control over the power button, so it will power off. Unfortunately this just kills it, so the file system is uncleanly mounted. Eventually this is going to kill data (if it hasn't already).

I want to reiterate that there is nothing in the logs that everyone isn't seeing with the intel drivers. I've been through countless bug trackers, as well as threads here and elsewhere. Does anyone have any idea what I can do to get this machine to close gracefully? If I can't get X/intel to play nicely, is there something I can do to get the power button to close the system properly?

lucke · 2009-02-22 16:56:05

Maybe you should try suspending it to disk instead of shutting down? Have you tried using magic sysrq to shutdown it cleanly?

skottish · 2009-02-22 17:25:57

lucke wrote:

Maybe you should try suspending it to disk instead of shutting down? Have you tried using magic sysrq to shutdown it cleanly?

I haven't tried suspend and this is the first time that I've heard of magic sysrq. I have my doubts that suspend will work because this is without question X crashing, and all functions related to X lock up. Will magic sysrq respond even if X is unresponsive?

--EDIT--

Alright, yes magic sysreq can do this. Is it safe to use as a replacement for 'shutdown -h'?

lucke · 2009-02-22 18:00:04

If you "s(wait)ub" (sync - (wait) - unmount - reboot), you should be safe. You still might give suspend a spin, as it doesn't kill X.

skottish · 2009-02-22 18:26:55

I hope you don't mind all the newbish questions. I'm under tight time constraints and my ability to talk to the user is very limited when this computer needs to run.

The battery on the laptop isn't so good anymore, and when it goes empty then BIOS resets itself to an undesirable state unless edited. The setting for this computer is such that it has to be locked up when unsupervised, so it can't remained plugged in. It's a non-option to let the battery go dry. Does suspend to disk take much power?

lucke · 2009-02-22 18:55:10

If you suspend to disk (also known as hibernation) it drains as much power as if you'd have used "shutdown -h", eg. it powers down completely (powering down my MSI Wind apparently still drains its battery somewhat). It's the suspend to RAM that leaves RAM powered and thus drains power. I'm not sure, but latest pm-utils _might_ actually hybrid suspend (that is suspend to RAM _and_ also suspend to disk, in case RAM loses power) when using the suspend to disk option.

xaiviax · 2009-02-22 19:19:21

From my memory of this in the lost gentoo wiki, suspend to disc typically uses 2 to 3% of normal use batter power.

Last edited by xaiviax (2009-02-22 19:19:48)

skottish · 2009-02-22 20:06:32

lucke, thank you so much. Suspend seems to working. I'll have to do a bit of research on how to make sure that all modules get reloaded properly. Right now it seems that only fuse isn't restarting. I'll have to screw around with that a bit.

xaiviax wrote:

From my memory of this in the lost gentoo wiki, suspend to disc typically uses 2 to 3% of normal use batter power.

Thanks. The machine is powering off from all indications, so hopefully hibernate won't be a problem.

I'm not marking this thread solved until I'm 98.454% sure that it's working.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-02-19 05:32:54

Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#2 2009-02-22 15:57:52

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#3 2009-02-22 16:56:05

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#4 2009-02-22 17:25:57

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#5 2009-02-22 18:00:04

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#6 2009-02-22 18:26:55

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#7 2009-02-22 18:55:10

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#8 2009-02-22 19:19:21

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

#9 2009-02-22 20:06:32

Re: Help with occasional system locks when logging out or rebooting

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