Various papercut issues with GNOME

laborat · 2019-03-31 13:19:55

I've recently been having three 'papercut issues' with GNOME 3 (i.e. small, annoying, but not problematic for being able to use my system). I have no idea how to debug them, so I'm just putting them out here in case anyone else has had any problems similar to mine and knows what's going on.

gnome-shell is constantly using ~57% CPU and I don't know why.
If, directly after booting my system, I launch Firefox and navigate to a URL, it takes Firefox 30 seconds to begin looking up the address.
My PC sometimes does not power off if I shut down via the top-right shutdown icon in GNOME ('systemctl poweroff' has always worked thus far, though). It will hang at "Reached target Power-Off" and will only shut down if I press Alt+Sysrq+E. This does not happen all the time.

These are three weird issues that started happening a few weeks ago. I don't know what changed between then and now. I also don't know if these issues are related. Issue 2 seems to suggest some kind of DNS timeout, but there is nothing in the system log ('journalctl -xb') corresponding to the 30 seconds of lost time. Issue 3 looks like some kind of stray systemd service not shutting down properly, but I have no clue how to debug this since all shell access is obviously down at this point in the shutdown sequence.

I'll keep thinking of possible ideas to further debug these problems, but if anyone has any suggestions or maybe even knows what is going on, I would appreciate hearing it! I'll edit this post if I discover new information...

This is on a fully up-to-date amd64 Arch system. I'm not aware of anything special with my setup -- it's standard UEFI, boots using GRUB 2, dual boots with Windows. ~/.cache is on tmpfs, if that matters. The GPU is a Radeon RX470, using the standard amdgpu driver. The CPU is an Intel Skylake i7. The system dual boots with Windows, where I experience none of these problems, so it's probably not hardware-related.

ewaller · 2019-03-31 15:08:03

All three of those sound vaguely as if there may be a problem with your host name. I don't know or care if Gnome has their own way of dealing with host names. What is the output of hostnamectl?

V1del · 2019-03-31 15:15:26

The second might, the other two sound like common issues with gnome 3.32 and the lvmetad shutdown issue.

For the gnome problem, disable your custom extensions and check whether they've been updated for gnome 3.32 compatibility, for the shutdown issue that's likely lvmetad related, see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=245020

Either way, for both of these to be conclusively able to determine the cause we would need the output of e.g.

sudo journalctl -b-1 #If you ran into the shutdown issue on your previous boot for example

laborat · 2019-03-31 15:41:51

UPDATE: All issues solved, thanks guys!

Issue 1 was an (apparently known) problem with the TopIcons extension -- see https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/495/topicons/. I'll go look for a replacement

Issue 2: Still haven't gotten to the bottom of it, but wiping my .mozilla folder made the issue somewhat better -- we're now at roughly 10 seconds rather than precisely 30. Still don't know what the actual cause is, but as a completely clean Firefox does not have this problem it must be one of my addons.

Issue 3: Thanks very much for pointing me to this issue with lvmetad. I don't use LVMs, so I've disabled the service and regenerated the initramfs. Update: don't forget to also mask the services! Use this:

for x in $(systemctl list-unit-files|grep lvm|awk '{print $1}'); do sudo systemctl stop $x; sudo systemctl disable $x; sudo systemctl mask $x; done

Last edited by laborat (2019-04-10 17:09:59)

Arch Linux

#1 2019-03-31 13:19:55

Various papercut issues with GNOME

#2 2019-03-31 15:08:03

Re: Various papercut issues with GNOME

#3 2019-03-31 15:15:26

Re: Various papercut issues with GNOME

#4 2019-03-31 15:41:51

Re: Various papercut issues with GNOME

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