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#1 2010-04-12 20:43:16

B-Con
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From: USA
Registered: 2007-12-17
Posts: 554
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Random system hangs/crashes

I've had a lot of misc. "hanging" on my system as of late. I'm always one to overlook minor inconveniences or random crashes, but this is ridiculous.

* First, pacman hung on both my systems when doing an upgrade last month. Both systems had only gone about a week without being upgraded, and pacman hung on both. The entire system became unresponsive, and when I SSH'd in and did a reboot, X quit but the shutdown screen never went beyond the "Shutting down" message.

* Next, I've had an issue where removal of my thumb drive causes the vfat module to hang and it prevents me from re-using any other thumb drive. I pull the drive without properly unmounting it and with the contents of the drive open in PCManFM. I then close PCManFM. The vfat module becomes stuck and I can't unload it, and no other USB device gets recognized. As well, PCManFM refuses to launch.

* Also, I had a couple crashes of Firefox (almost assuredly flash-related) that brought the entire system down. Everything hung and a hard reboot was necessary.

* I've had a few other background scripts (run by conky) go <defunct> for some weird reason.

I'm not running any weird setup. Just stock Arch kernel + Openbox + whatever apps I want.

A kill -9 almost never actually kills the hanging process in question. Whats even more irritating is that when I'm trying to find and kill a bad process sometimes the "ps" command will hang when listing the process list, as if the hung program is preventing ps from getting a complete list.

Any ideas on any of these? Right now only the second one is an active problem, but the whole thing is ridiculous. Between my two computers, I'm being forced to reboot one or the other every third day.

[edit]
Also, when these problems occur, soft-rebooting is not always possible. "sudo shutdown -r now" often results in nothing.

Last edited by B-Con (2010-04-12 22:08:04)

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#2 2010-04-12 20:56:12

fsckd
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Registered: 2009-06-15
Posts: 4,173

Re: Random system hangs/crashes

what kernel are you using

and have you considered a virgin sacrifice to appease the wrath of the gods?


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#3 2010-04-12 21:10:19

graysky
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Re: Random system hangs/crashes

Bad memory?  Run memtest86+ to be sure.


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#4 2010-04-12 22:30:57

B-Con
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From: USA
Registered: 2007-12-17
Posts: 554
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Re: Random system hangs/crashes

With relation to the vfat problem, it seems that PCManFM is getting in the way. If I have the USB drive contents open and I remove the drive then it will not be unmounted and I have to do so explicitly with "umount -l". At that point, the vfat module gets locked and can't be unloaded. Also, the /dev/sd* device never gets removed, it stays there after the device is gone.

As far as I know all PCManFM does is keep an open handle to the current directory. I know it uses FAM, but what could FAM be doing that prevents an open directory's filesystem from being unmounted?

I'll try a memory test later, but I did one when I got the laptop and it had no errors. (Granted, that was 1.3 years ago.)

I'm running kernel version 2.6.32.10.

I'll get back to you on the virgin thing after ComicCon. ;-)

Last edited by B-Con (2010-04-12 22:32:58)

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#5 2010-04-13 01:38:16

B-Con
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From: USA
Registered: 2007-12-17
Posts: 554
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Re: Random system hangs/crashes

Ran memtest, no errors.

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#6 2010-04-19 04:43:53

B-Con
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From: USA
Registered: 2007-12-17
Posts: 554
Website

Re: Random system hangs/crashes

I think I've found a connection between two of the issues I reported:

As mentioned above, the vfat module consistently hangs when I pull the flash drive out while I have a directory on the mount point of the flash drive open in PCManFM. Bizzare. I can't unload the module or use it again in any way without rebooting.

I've even tried doing an rmmod -f (stock Arch kernel apparently ships with CONFIG_MODULE_FORCE_UNLOAD=y) and the rmmod process hangs causing ps to no longer be able to report all active processes.

However, when I do that rmmod -f and ps hangs, I have conky scripts that are called every few seconds that call ps, and since ps consistently can't get a process list, it seems to cause those scripts to go <defunct>.

Anyway, still looking for a vfat solution. Nothing gets written to any logs as far as I can tell.

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