KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

krigun · 2007-02-21 11:57:18

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone else is having the same trouble as me:

From time to time, the display on my laptop does not refresh for 10-15 seconds, but the mouse cursor is moving. This happens most often right after KDE startup. Suspect it may have something to do with my graphics card, since sometimes when I write OpenGL code though JOGL, the display freezes alltogether (Im quite sure the OpenGL code is valid), mouse cursor and all. Then it only helps to shutdown machine by holding in the power button.

Can this sort of behaviour be caused by bad xorg config, in regards of nvidia driver settings?

Running latest Xorg, KDE, nvidia-beyond and kernel-beyond.

To me it seems like some sort of hardware issue, but I just wanted to know if anyone else has seen this kind of behaviour?

Peace,
Gunnar

skottish · 2007-02-21 12:46:13

I was having similar problems with the 2.6.19ck kernel. I never saw it happen with the vanilla 2.6.19 kernel. After everything upgraded to 2.6.20ck, I haven't had any problems.

krigun · 2007-02-21 13:01:28

Thanks! Nice to hear, I havent tried the vanilla kernel in a long time, guess I'd better check it out. Im still running beyond 2.6.19

skottish · 2007-02-21 15:10:29

Yeah, it's funny, I only run the vanilla kernel to test if there seems to be a problem with the CK kernel.

Captain Spaulding · 2007-02-21 18:13:09

I, too, experience occasional freezes -- display is not refreshed and file transfers choke for about 10 seconds -- under KDE (from KDEmod). I'm using a custom 2.6.20 with FOSS radeon drivers for my ATI XPress 200M junk. A quick test with XFCE4 didn't show any problems, but I might just have been lucky.

krigun · 2007-02-22 14:19:57

Thanks for the tip, skottish! Using vanilla 2.6.20 instead of beyond 2.6.19, the problem seems to be gone. Perhaps it was an issue with the 2.6.19 kernel..

superstoned · 2007-03-11 19:05:33

-ck tries to be smart, increasing and decreasing the priority of processes. The mainline does that, too, but less aggressively. The advantage is better interactivity, the disadvantage is the chance of a stall, caused by processes blocking each other (called priority inversion - a thread who's priority has been elevated wants data from a lower-prio process, but blocks the lower-prio one from running due to it's higher prio).

Relatively rare, but ppl with certain workloads experience it more than others, and it's very annoying. The normal kernel scheduler has the same problem, but to a slightly lesser extend, and generally has shorter stalls as well.

To solve this problem once and for all, Con Kolivas has recently started a totally new (but based on staircase) design for the scheduler, aiming at perfect fairness (thus all processes always can get the same cputime on a certain priority, solving the priority inversion problem). Within these constraints of totall fairness, the scheduler is as interactive as possible.

Linus has expressed interest in this new design, and Con and several other kernel hackers are working on it to improve his scheduler, called RSDL. If this works out, we're going to have a very responsive (though slightly less than current -ck in some cases, esp with high load) but perfectly fair, stairvation-free scheduler in the kernel, giving shorter and more predictable latencies, better SMP scaling and slightly better throughput as well (at least that's what it looks like now ;-)).

If you're a LWN.net reader, there was an article in the last LWN Weekly news about RSDL. Will be available for non-subscribers in a few days.
http://lwn.net/Articles/224865/

The document explaining what RSDL is and how it works by Con:
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/staircase … ler.readme

krigun · 2007-03-13 21:32:56

Wow, thanks for the info! I was starting to think it was something wrong with my hardware. Im running the stock kernel now, and the freezes are definately gone. I wish them luck with the design of the new scheduler, hope to see it soon ;-)

Arch Linux

#1 2007-02-21 11:57:18

KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#2 2007-02-21 12:46:13

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#3 2007-02-21 13:01:28

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#4 2007-02-21 15:10:29

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#5 2007-02-21 18:13:09

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#6 2007-02-22 14:19:57

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#7 2007-03-11 19:05:33

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

#8 2007-03-13 21:32:56

Re: KDE freezes occasionaly (Dell XPS M1710, nvidia 7900GS, kernel-beyond)

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