full system freeze

m4rotku · 2012-04-23 20:12:33

Hey guys,

This is my first time posting with a problem. I wanted to avoid doing so, since I don't have many details as to what could possibly be causing it, but since it is such a frequently occurring and annoying error, and since there is this Newbie Corner, I thought that I might as well post it.

Every once in a while, my laptop completely freezes to the extent that the mouse doesn't move and I can't type, switch windows nor workspaces, nor even switch to another tty. At these times, the only thing that I can do is a hard restart via the power button. This happens very frequently while I am on skype, but it and has also happened when using Libreoffice or during low-resource tasks such as trying to post this problem on the forum. It happens indiscriminately of whether or not the laptop is plugged in and regardless of which windows manager I'm using (either icewm or fluxbox). I checked all of the log files that I thought might contain information regarding the crash and I can't seem to find anything unusual (though I am up for suggestions as to which log files to check more in-depth and what such an error would look like).

The only think that I can think of that might have caused this reoccuring error is a few months ago, when I had my login set to boot the windows manager automatically after logging in, I logged in to a 2nd tty and a second icewm session appeared (in tty8). I had previously thought this impossible, since most of my experience comes from Ubuntu and it is not allowed by default there. This is the only event that I can think of that may've led to this happening, since I can't remember it happening before making this mistake. I have since then changed the way that my windows manager starts, so that I can now access a new tty without getting a windows manager.

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may be causing the problem, and how I might fix it, their comments are greatly welcomed.

Many thanks,
M4rotku

Gcool · 2012-04-24 05:41:43

Welcome to the forums.

Please provide some more info about your system. What laptop (brand/type) is it, which VGA chipset are you using, which kernel, VGA drivers,...?

KingX · 2012-04-24 06:44:40

On my system I have noticed a few times Skype going crazy and eating up one of my cpu core's. It will out of the blue start consuming 100% cpu and only a pkill fixes it. If your laptop is single core, I wouldn't be surprised if it is Skype that hogs up your cpu. One thing you can do is run conky and keep an eye on your top 4 cpu/mem processes. So in the case of a freeze you can maybe see if a program is consuming 100% cpu.

It could be kernel related. But like Gcool said more info about your hardware would be helpful, and maybe take a look at your logs to see if something shows up causing errors.

/dev/zero · 2012-04-24 07:12:58

I also have this problem. It has nothing to do with skype - I don't use it. The problem's been happening since day one, but always intermittent. After it's happened, I've tried booting from a LiveCD to check the logs, but nothing stood out.

For me, "lspci -nn" gives:

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller [8086:0104] (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0116] (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:1c3a] (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 [8086:1c2d] (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1c20] (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 [8086:1c10] (rev b4)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 [8086:1c12] (rev b4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 [8086:1c16] (rev b4)
00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 [8086:1c26] (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller [8086:1c49] (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller [8086:1c03] (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:1c22] (rev 04)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM57785 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe [14e4:16b5] (rev 10)
02:00.1 SD Host controller [0805]: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57765 Memory Card Reader [14e4:16bc] (rev 10)
02:00.2 System peripheral [0880]: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:16be] (rev 10)
02:00.3 System peripheral [0880]: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:16bf] (rev 10)
03:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43227 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4358]
05:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1033:0194] (rev 04)

I do get a lot of obnoxious puke in my logs and all over my ttys from the broadcom-wl driver; no other driver seems to work for this card.

I'm sure it's not system load. I keep things fairly lightweight. My window manager is wmii and aside from chromium, I mainly work in a console (vim, mutt ...). It also seems to happen without any warning - it's not like the system starts slowing down first. Perfectly fine one minute, not working the next, with seemingly random times between crashes.

Hopefully OP will also give some more information - we might be able to find some overlap.

Edit: laptop is an Acer 5750. The graphics driver is i915. I have a custom kernel. Passing flags to it at boot time to affect i915 seems to neither help nor hurt. Maybe or maybe not relevant, I use LVM and LUKS.

Last edited by /dev/zero (2012-04-24 07:15:05)

m4rotku · 2012-04-24 19:18:51

Oh, sorry, that would probably help. It is a Lemur UltraThin from System76, but it's not the newest model of Lemurs. Here is the results of my lspci:

$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 18)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 18)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 06)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 06)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a6)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem (rev 06)
03:00.0 Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8191SEvB Wireless LAN Controller (rev 10)
04:00.0 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller (rev 80)
04:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller (rev 80)
04:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller (rev 80)
04:00.5 Ethernet controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMC250 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03)
ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 05)
ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 05)
ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 05)
ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 05)
ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05)
ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05)

As for the kernel:

$ uname -a
Linux Lemur 3.3.2-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Apr 14 09:48:37 CEST 2012 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU U 330 @ 1.20GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Let me know if you need any more info. Hopefully this will help. Both /dev/zero and I seem to have a lot of Intel stuff.

viking60 · 2012-04-24 21:14:53

Do you use networkmanager? I had simmular behavior on my Aspire 5250 and everytime I unplug the network cable to use wifi it just goes to an immediate halt after a short while.So I use netcfg and have commented out (removed) networkmanager in the daemons in /etc/rc.conf

/dev/zero · 2012-04-24 22:37:06

@viking60: I generally use wicd. I never use network manager.

@OP: Comparing our two lspci outputs, I don't see any direct overlap. Sure, lots of intel stuff, but I think that's fairly ubiquitous.

What do you get from,

lspci -vmk | tr '\t' ' ' | awk -F': ' '/Driver/ {print $2}' | sort -u

The "-vmk" makes lspci output nicely formatted information on required drivers. The tr and awk turns the formatted output into a list of driver names, and sort -u removes double-ups and puts the drivers in alphabetical order.

I get:

agpgart-intel
ahci
ehci_hcd
i915
pcieport
sdhci-pci
snd_hda_intel
tg3
wl
xhci_hcd

Last edited by /dev/zero (2012-04-24 22:37:31)

cfr · 2012-04-24 22:58:43

Possibly related:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 6#p1078176

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/29276

If I had to guess, something intel would be top of my list of suspects...

/dev/zero · 2012-04-24 23:08:13

cfr wrote:

Possibly related:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 6#p1078176
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/29276
If I had to guess, something intel would be top of my list of suspects...

Those links seem fairly recent, whereas my problem has been ongoing for about 6 months (ever since I first bought this laptop and put Arch on it).

Of course, maybe there are a few independent problems that yield similar symptoms ...

There was also another thread about how to debug a problem like this, but I don't recall anyone coming up with many useful answers.

m4rotku · 2012-04-30 05:48:56

Here is my resulting output:

agpgart-intel
ahci
ehci_hcd
i915
intel ips
jmb38x_ms
jme
mei
pcieport
rtl8192se
sdhci-pci
snd_hda_intel

We have a lot of stuff in common, but I'm not quite sure what that means.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-04-23 20:12:33

full system freeze

#2 2012-04-24 05:41:43

Re: full system freeze

#3 2012-04-24 06:44:40

Re: full system freeze

#4 2012-04-24 07:12:58

Re: full system freeze

#5 2012-04-24 19:18:51

Re: full system freeze

#6 2012-04-24 21:14:53

Re: full system freeze

#7 2012-04-24 22:37:06

Re: full system freeze

#8 2012-04-24 22:58:43

Re: full system freeze

#9 2012-04-24 23:08:13

Re: full system freeze

#10 2012-04-30 05:48:56

Re: full system freeze

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