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bparker

Member

Registered: 2014-01-28

Posts: 4

System frequently hangs/freezes with all processes in D state

When I am browsing the web with chromium (with lots of tabs/images/etc.) or running virtual machines with kvm, occasionally (at least a few times a day) my system will suddenly become unresponsive for several minutes, until the OOM killer is invoked (or I can kill e.g. chromium from the console) and the system returns to normal. However, I'm not convinced that it is simply an out-of-memory problem, because:

- OOM killer is always invoked even when there is plenty of free RAM (at least 4-700MB out of 4GB, I have no swap), see dmesg output below which shows usage of current processes, it does not go over the limit
- the majority of all processes instantly become stuck in the D state out of nowhere when the hanging occurs
- killing e.g. qemu or chromium from the console always returns the system to normal (again, when there is still even free RAM)

After installing ulatencyd from AUR I was able to have just enough system responsiveness to run a few commands from the console during the hang:

There is only one block device mounted, my SSD, which is at /. There are no network mounts, swap or anything else. When the processes are stuck in D state, the hard drive is still responsive from the console, e.g. touch somefile works quickly

About the D processes, here is output of ps axl | awk '$10 ~ /D/':

1 0 36 2 20 0 0 0 conges D ? 0:25 [kswapd0]
4 0 203 187 20 0 598860 297336 conges Dsl+ tty1 31:44 /usr/sbin/X :0 -auth /run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt1 -novtswitch
4 0 14486 1 20 0 146056 21264 conges DLsl ? 11:48 /usr/bin/ulatencyd
0 1000 16630 566 20 0 976948 171812 conges Dl ? 1:46 /usr/lib/chromium/chromium --incognito --password-store=kwallet
1 1000 17740 16639 25 5 1054504 70300 conges DNl ? 0:11 /usr/lib/chromium/chromium --type=renderer --disable-databases --lang=en-US --force-fieldtrials=DeferBackgroundExtensionCreation/Deferred/Prefetch/ContentPrefetchPrefetchOn/Prerender/PrerenderControl/PrerenderFromOmnibox/OmniboxPrerenderEnabled/UMA-New-Install-Uniformity-Trial/Control/UMA-Session-Randomized-Uniformity-Trial-5-Percent/group_12/UMA-Uniformity-Trial-1-Percent/group_68/UMA-Uniformity-Trial-10-Percent/group_09/UMA-Uniformity-Trial-100-Percent/group_01/UMA-Uniformity-Trial-20-Percent/group_02/UMA-Uniformity-Trial-5-Percent/group_12/UMA-Uniformity-Trial-50-Percent/group_01/ --enable-deadline-scheduling --disable-client-side-phishing-detection --disable-gl-multisampling --disable-accelerated-2d-canvas --disable-accelerated-video-decode --channel=16630.30.1536067666
0 1000 25026 1 20 0 179156 840 conges D ? 0:00 journalctl -rn3
0 1000 25046 25044 20 0 8 4 conges D+ pts/3 0:00 [awk]

Not sure what function could be "conges" here, I'm assuming it's waiting on the hard drive or it's some driver bug perhaps?

And a picture of iotop during the hang, showing very high IO of most processes for seemingly no reason: http://i.imgur.com/ZmVFDQ2.jpg

The problem has been occurring at least since the last few updates to the linux package, but I cannot remember how long this has been happening. I have not noticed it with any other applications besides qemu and chromium, but I also don't do a lot of intensive computing outside of those programs.

Another interesting tidbit is that my USB mouse always appears to disconnect/re-connect itself sometime during the hang, but no other USB device exhibits this problem (keyboard/webcam/etc. never disconnect, just the mouse).

Every time the system hangs I get this:

[477439.679672] usb 3-2.2: USB disconnect, device number 13
[477441.146367] usb 3-2.2: new low-speed USB device number 14 using xhci_hcd
[477441.164535] usb 3-2.2: ep 0x81 - rounding interval to 64 microframes, ep desc says 80 microframes
[477441.239936] input: Logitech USB Optical Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb3/3-2/3-2.2/3-2.2:1.0/input/input23
[477441.240216] hid-generic 0003:046D:C05A.000C: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Logitech USB Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:00:14.0-2.2/input0

The hardware is Acer W700 tablet with i5-3337U CPU, 256GB mSATA SSD, 4GB ram. I have another laptop (Panasonic CF-SX1 with i5-M) with the same software setup that does not have this problem.

Additional info:

Kernel version: 3.12.8-1-ARCH
Devices in system: http://dpaste.com/1572964/
dmesg: http://dpaste.com/1572965/

UPDATE: Invoking the OOM killer manually via Alt+SysRq+F seems to always bring the system back to normal immediately, it always ends up killing the chromium process with the most memory usage. For example the last time I invoked it, the tab it killed was using 1GB ram while I still had 600MB free.

Last edited by bparker (2014-01-30 01:05:59)

bparker

Member

Registered: 2014-01-28

Posts: 4

Re: System frequently hangs/freezes with all processes in D state

Bump, still having this problem. Tried an LTS kernel (3.10.28-1.1-lts) and the issue still persists. Anyone have an idea? This machine is basically unusable for me.

bparker

Member

Registered: 2014-01-28

Posts: 4

Re: System frequently hangs/freezes with all processes in D state

Also tried newest kernel 3.13.7-1 (which I can't continue to use because of intel graphics issues compared to LTS kernel), but the issue still persists.

Avathar

Member

Registered: 2014-05-04

Posts: 4

Re: System frequently hangs/freezes with all processes in D state

Hi!

I got the same problem on my Lenovo T410 Laptop!

When using 5-6GB of my 8GB ram, the system starts to get unresponsivly when starting a new application or opening a new tab in the browser.
The symptoms are exactly the same, some processes are going into D-state and after some time, some of them get killed to free up memory.
Also iotop is showing high io of kswapd, although i have no swap.

I've also tried several distributions (arch, manjaro, ubuntu), but with no luck.

bparker

Member

Registered: 2014-01-28

Posts: 4

Re: System frequently hangs/freezes with all processes in D state

Glad to see someone else having the same problem, at least I know I'm not crazy. At this point I've pretty much given up on this hardware and will probably sell it, I just can't get anything to work right on it. I have a panasonic laptop with the same setup that works great and performs better anyway so I'm just chalking it up to the machine for now. Hope you solve your issues though

Avathar

Member

Registered: 2014-05-04

Posts: 4

Re: System frequently hangs/freezes with all processes in D state

Hm..after some fiddling around, i discovered that chromium/chrome seems to be the reason, that my system gets unresponsivly if a large amount of ram is used.
I tried filling a lot of RAM without opening chrome (firefox, eclipse, netbeans, VMs, etc) and the system was totally usable, although it slowed down considerably when i used over 7GB of my 8GB, but this seems normal to me..