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#1 2012-04-23 07:36:01

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

First of all I've been following these two threads until no one has posted anymore
Hard lockup, no logs, how to debug?
Computer freezing how to troubleshoot?

Actually, for me, they have been too general in the sense that most everyone has found a completely different solution, for some it was ATI, some Nvidia, some Gnome, some had solved it with specific modules like wifi. But I need answers for mine and since I have no clue if it's kernel / module related, hardware, software or ever where to look anymore (newbie forever!) I'm posting to the Newbie forum.

And this is how it looks:
Around November last year my computer started freezing, AMD64 2,6GHz desktop, 4GB RAM, Nvidia onboard graphics, all about 3 y.o. including the installation of Arch Linux x86-64. Until now I never had a problem. Then it all came down. It froze so often causing me to do so many hard resets that I eventually lost about 100GBs of data, only some of which I could recover. And it continued to freeze, so over the holidays I reinstalled Arch 64 and KDE, this time however alongside Ubuntu - just in case... In the beginning it froze up mostly while playing audio or video in Amarok and XBMC, but this is what I usually do with it anyway, often just surfing in Opera or Chromium, occasionally moving files and sometimes just clicking anywhere with the mouse will do the trick.

And this is what I have attempted to solve this, well, besides a completely new installation, I have tried downgrading many packages, removed daemons, switched to linux-lts, tried the nouveau driver, tried different audio backends, removing unneeded gstreamer plugins, switched off compositing, removed my dot kde directory, created a new user - all without absolutely any difference in behavior.

Then I thought it might very well be a hardware issue althought I have to say this - Ubuntu has not crashed even once. Over the weekend I left Ubuntu running for 3 days and found it just as I left it, then booted in to Arch, went to play softball for a couple of hours and came back to a frozen system. I also installed a case fan, bought a new Nvidia card but nothing has changed. When it freezes I can reboot and it will run for another few hours, so it can't be too hot.

This is a real nightmare and I cannot find anything in the logs, only an occasional suspicion that leads to nowhere. My suspicions now are powersaving and evdev. I really don't know where else to look so I am asking the help of the Arch community to have a look at what I have previously posted in the aforementioned threads in addition to my description here and tell me which logs you would like to see. Many thanks!

Last edited by subatomic (2012-05-03 20:22:45)

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#2 2012-04-23 09:16:00

phyte
Member
Registered: 2012-03-27
Posts: 17

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Without reading the links but have you tried to disable hardware acceleration in /etc/adobe/mms.cfg ?
This did the trick for me. I had almost an identical situation like you.


Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark

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#3 2012-04-24 07:29:51

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

It was looking good there for a while...

HWAcceleration was already commented out, I removed the hash and switched the value to "0". This might have explained why Chromium freezes the system so often and that the flashplugin is not even installed on Ubuntu. Unfortunately it did not seem to help, this morning there was no response.

Last edited by subatomic (2012-04-24 07:48:17)

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#4 2012-04-24 12:25:41

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,866

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Subatomic, i've checked the posts you made in the other threads, and have a few comments / suggestions :

- Crond
All jobs that are run by cron can be found in 1 of the /etc/cron.* folders, check those.

- you appear to be using bluetooth and infrared devices, can you remove them or replace them with more standard stuff, like a usb-mouse ?

- i suggest you disable powersaving options, especially things like hibernation and suspend.

- switch to another WM/DE to find out if KDE is the problem.


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#5 2012-04-24 23:09:27

cfr
Member
From: Cymru
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 7,130

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

I don't think it is that everyone else has a fix and you are the only one still experiencing this, by the way. (Though it is true that I am doing better with the LTS kernel - I haven't booted the non-LTS for a bit now and am just defaulting to LTS. But it isn't a pancea.)

Here's bug I filed:

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

but you may be experiencing something different, of course.


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#6 2012-04-25 08:39:09

DSpider
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2009-08-23
Posts: 2,273

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Like Lone_Wolf said, try using something like Openbox or Fluxbox for a while so that you can at least rule out KDE. KDE is a very complex beast while Openbox, on the other hand, is very well coded and compact.

You shouldn't be losing data. That sounds like a hardware problem to me. Since Ubuntu was installed on a different partition, maybe the HDD has a few bad sectors on the Arch partition which corrupted some libraries. For example, my / contains 236.585 files, in 23.638 subfolders. And I'm only guessing here, but around 80-90% of them are probably important for system stability. Anyway, I would run something like SpinRite or HDD Regenerator overnight, just to make sure. Or at the very least run an fsck: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fs … e_Easy_Way


"How to Succeed with Linux"

I have made a personal commitment not to reply in topics that start with a lowercase letter. Proper grammar and punctuation is a sign of respect, and if you do not show any, you will NOT receive any help (at least not from me).

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#7 2012-04-25 19:54:39

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Thanks to everyone who has posted suggestions, I do appreciate the help.

Now to be honest, I do believe the problem is KDE. I booted into KDE yesterday but did not login, just left the login screen up. Nearly two days later it was still running, the longest it's gone without freezing, yet idle. Anyway I'm sitting here getting reading to post a reply, open Dolphin to check some conf files and it freezes! I'll try another WM as suggested.

As far as powersaving goes, I really don't know. Let me say this: it is a stock Arch install, pm-utils and upower are installed but I have not made any configurations, I don't even understand how to configure hibernation and suspend, so whatever is set by default, well, that's what I got. Besides that, the Power Management service in KDE is disabled, as well as File Indexing. And as I once suspected crond, this too has been removed from the daemons.

I'll post again with some results of my experiences with a new Desktop. Thanks again everyone!

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#8 2012-04-27 10:57:00

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

It's definitely something with KDE !

I installed Gnome, it started quickly - KDE was hanging a little at start - and it also seems to stay up. I started KDE again and everything crashed time and again.
I'm even starting to like the UI in Gnome 3. Anyway, it's not just KDE or Qt because Chromium freezes very often in KDE, and is my only Gtk app.

So where do I go from here?

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#9 2012-04-27 11:45:48

phyte
Member
Registered: 2012-03-27
Posts: 17

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Then I suggest, you get used to Gnome wink

Did you take a look at ".xsession-errors" in your home directory?
Another file worth looking at might be /var/log/kdm.log    (if you use kdm)
Most error/warning messages of KDE and the programs you run in it should appear in those files.


Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark

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#10 2012-04-27 13:06:31

toad
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From: if only I knew
Registered: 2008-12-22
Posts: 1,775
Website

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Have you tried a new user/renamed ~/.kde4?


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#11 2012-04-27 14:21:30

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

subatomic wrote:

And this is what I have attempted to solve this, well, besides a completely new installation, I have tried downgrading many packages, removed daemons, switched to linux-lts, tried the nouveau driver, tried different audio backends, removing unneeded gstreamer plugins, switched off compositing, removed my dot kde directory, created a new user - all without absolutely any difference in behavior.

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#12 2012-04-27 21:55:57

cfr
Member
From: Cymru
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 7,130

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Just out of curiosity, how much memory do you have?

I ask because two things seem to make it worse:
- the current kernel (rather than LTS)
- less memory

I've had only one crash with the LTS kernel and that was with less memory. (I'm not counting VGA-disconnect issues as that seems to be a distinct problem.)

I'm loathe to try another DE because last time I had multiple DEs installed, it all got very confusing. And I couldn't even figure out how to get OpenBox to work. Though I really picked KDE for Kile.


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#13 2012-04-28 11:16:16

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,866

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

cfr wrote:

Just out of curiosity, how much memory do you have?

I ask because two things seem to make it worse:
- the current kernel (rather than LTS)
- less memory

I've had only one crash with the LTS kernel and that was with less memory. (I'm not counting VGA-disconnect issues as that seems to be a distinct problem.)

I'm loathe to try another DE because last time I had multiple DEs installed, it all got very confusing. And I couldn't even figure out how to get OpenBox to work. Though I really picked KDE for Kile.

You CAN use kde applications under other WM/DE's , i've been running lxde for almost a year now, but still use K3b, Krusafer, Kaffeine and Kate .
They start slower (first time you use them) then under KDE as the KDE libraries need to be loaded first, but work fine.


Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#14 2012-04-29 02:31:17

cfr
Member
From: Cymru
Registered: 2011-11-27
Posts: 7,130

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

I just had a freeze with the LTS kernel despite my usual amount of memory. However, I was playing with fractals at the time...

One reason I doubt it is KDE per se is that other people are reporting much the same thing with other DEs/WMs and, even, with no DE/WM running at all. However, KDE uses a lot of resources so if it is linked with resource usage, it would be worse with KDE than, say, OpenBox.


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#15 2012-04-29 16:21:38

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

I have 4 Gb of memory and the first thing I did was ran memtest without problems. I bought a new graphic card with 1 Gb memory but I was still experiencing freezes.

But I'm definitely on to something... I was thinking that the problem has been caused by some event handler or input driver possibly related to my remote control, so finally I got the idea to stop the lirc daemon and the system has been stable for a while now. If it is still up tomorrow I'll try downgrading lirc.

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#16 2012-05-03 06:48:44

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

It is lirc which is causing the freezes. When I start the daemon I can hear the fan speed up and it will eventually freeze up. When I stop lircd the system will run stable - for days. Don't know why it took me so long to figure this one out! Downgrading is not possible since the version prior to when the freezing started - Nov 2011 - is dependent on the 2.6 kernel.

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#17 2012-05-03 08:48:47

DSpider
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2009-08-23
Posts: 2,273

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Infrared remote control kernel module. Who knew? Next time I'll remember to suggest removing all modules that aren't important for system boot. A pristine initramfs, with absolutely nothing but the basic modules in there. That would've narrowed it down.

Anyway, don't forget to mark it as solved. Great job.


"How to Succeed with Linux"

I have made a personal commitment not to reply in topics that start with a lowercase letter. Proper grammar and punctuation is a sign of respect, and if you do not show any, you will NOT receive any help (at least not from me).

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#18 2012-05-03 20:18:14

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

This is far from being solved! Great job? I'll mark it solved when I have a solution!

I posted a while ago that the system was freezing at 1 min after the hour, so I suspected some cron job and removed crond. Now after days of uptime I started lircd this morning and the system froze at 2:01

May  3 10:08:32 arch64 lircd: lircd(default) ready, using /var/run/lirc/lircd
May  3 10:10:26 arch64 lircd: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd
May  3 12:17:34 arch64 lircd: error reading from /dev/lirc0 (ret -1, expected 4)
May  3 12:17:34 arch64 lircd: No such device
May  3 13:01:40 arch64 lircd: error reading from /dev/lirc0 (ret -1, expected 4)
May  3 13:01:40 arch64 lircd: No such device
May  3 13:31:02 arch64 lircd: error reading from /dev/lirc0 (ret -1, expected 4)
May  3 13:31:02 arch64 lircd: No such device

Anyone know what this error could be?

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#19 2012-05-03 21:11:58

DSpider
Member
From: Romania
Registered: 2009-08-23
Posts: 2,273

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Do you absolutely need to use an infrared device? Just curious. Because on one hand you have the convenience of using a remote control (or is it what? A mobile phone, a mouse?), and on the other hand you have system fricken stability!

Maybe the Ubuntu package has some sort of patches applied for newer kernel versions? I doubt it, since the Source Files (specifically the PKGBUILD) from lirc 1:0.9.0-16 (which was updated on 2012-04-28) has 'linux>=3.3' as dependency. Hmmm... Maybe you just configured it wrong on Arch.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lirc

Remove the lirc package, remove any files that you think it may have left behind (/etc/lirc/lircd.conf?), reboot and start from the beginning.


PS: The lirc package may have been updated on 2012-04-28, but lirc-0.9.0.tar.bz2 apparently was released on 26-Mar-2011, over a year ago: http://www.lirc.org I'm not sure why it even needs a 'linux>=3.3' dependency.


"How to Succeed with Linux"

I have made a personal commitment not to reply in topics that start with a lowercase letter. Proper grammar and punctuation is a sign of respect, and if you do not show any, you will NOT receive any help (at least not from me).

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#20 2012-05-04 12:45:46

Lone_Wolf
Member
From: Netherlands, Europe
Registered: 2005-10-04
Posts: 11,866

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

DSpider wrote:

PS: The lirc package may have been updated on 2012-04-28, but lirc-0.9.0.tar.bz2 apparently was released on 26-Mar-2011, over a year ago: http://www.lirc.org I'm not sure why it even needs a 'linux>=3.3' dependency.

That question has an easy answer : lirc provides several kernel modules, and kernel modules need to be built against a specific kernel.

lirc 1:0.9.0-16 File List

Package has 3 files and 3 directories.

Back to Package

    lib/
    lib/modules/
    lib/modules/extramodules-3.3-ARCH/
    lib/modules/extramodules-3.3-ARCH/lirc_atiusb.ko.gz
    lib/modules/extramodules-3.3-ARCH/lirc_wpc8769l.ko.gz
    lib/modules/extramodules-3.3-ARCH/lirc_i2c.ko.gz

Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.


(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)

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#21 2012-05-10 05:41:05

subatomic
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-06-26
Posts: 180

Re: LIRC / KDE freezing for months, need a solution now!

Experimenting hat taken some time, but I can confirm that Gnome freezes too when lircd is running.
Here is a bit of my kernel.log at the time of the latest freeze at 12:21

May  8 11:14:18 localhost kernel: [ 5333.379933] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 2
May  8 11:14:18 localhost kernel: [ 5333.379938] usb 1-1.4: USB disconnect, device number 3
May  8 11:14:18 localhost kernel: [ 5333.379997] streamzap 1-1.4:1.0: urb terminated, status: -108
May  8 11:14:18 localhost kernel: [ 5333.720026] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5333.871393] hub 1-1:1.0: USB hub found
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5333.871517] hub 1-1:1.0: 4 ports detected
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5334.150533] usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5334.269155] Registered IR keymap rc-streamzap
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5334.269237] input: Streamzap PC Remote Infrared Receiver (0e9c:0000) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.0/rc/rc1/input11
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5334.269319] rc1: Streamzap PC Remote Infrared Receiver (0e9c:0000) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.0/rc/rc1
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5334.269432] rc rc1: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (streamzap) registered at minor = 0
May  8 11:14:19 localhost kernel: [ 5334.269450] streamzap 1-1.4:1.0: Registered Streamzap, Inc. Streamzap Remote Control on usb1:5
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.000431] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 4
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.000435] usb 1-1.4: USB disconnect, device number 5
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.000493] streamzap 1-1.4:1.0: urb terminated, status: -108
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.350026] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 6 using ehci_hcd
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.501492] hub 1-1:1.0: USB hub found
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.501644] hub 1-1:1.0: 4 ports detected
May  8 11:14:27 localhost kernel: [ 5342.780535] usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device number 7 using ehci_hcd
May  8 11:14:28 localhost kernel: [ 5342.899300] Registered IR keymap rc-streamzap
May  8 11:14:28 localhost kernel: [ 5342.899406] input: Streamzap PC Remote Infrared Receiver (0e9c:0000) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.0/rc/rc2/input12
May  8 11:14:28 localhost kernel: [ 5342.899488] rc2: Streamzap PC Remote Infrared Receiver (0e9c:0000) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.0/rc/rc2
May  8 11:14:28 localhost kernel: [ 5342.899604] rc rc2: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (streamzap) registered at minor = 0
May  8 11:14:28 localhost kernel: [ 5342.899625] streamzap 1-1.4:1.0: Registered Streamzap, Inc. Streamzap Remote Control on usb1:7
May  8 12:01:57 localhost kernel: [ 8192.646296] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 6
May  8 12:01:57 localhost kernel: [ 8192.646300] usb 1-1.4: USB disconnect, device number 7
May  8 12:01:57 localhost kernel: [ 8192.646359] streamzap 1-1.4:1.0: urb terminated, status: -108
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.010034] usb 1-1: new high speed USB device number 8 using ehci_hcd
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.161721] hub 1-1:1.0: USB hub found
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.161880] hub 1-1:1.0: 4 ports detected
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.440895] usb 1-1.4: new low speed USB device number 9 using ehci_hcd
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.559510] Registered IR keymap rc-streamzap
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.559585] input: Streamzap PC Remote Infrared Receiver (0e9c:0000) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.0/rc/rc3/input13
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.559637] rc3: Streamzap PC Remote Infrared Receiver (0e9c:0000) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4/1-1.4:1.0/rc/rc3
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.559752] rc rc3: lirc_dev: driver ir-lirc-codec (streamzap) registered at minor = 0
May  8 12:01:58 localhost kernel: [ 8193.559770] streamzap 1-1.4:1.0: Registered Streamzap, Inc. Streamzap Remote Control on usb1:9

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