Arch Linux

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

Hey guys.
I've been having some strange problems, and I'm not even sure when they started.

Lately my system has been having hard freezes, ie, locked up, I can move the mouse and the music keeps playing but I can't restart X, change tty or even activate the Caps Lock key. Only fix is a SysRq + B.
While that was annoying, now I can't even login. After one of those lock ups + reboot, my system hangs on logging in with the hard drive light on.

My question here is: what files / errors should I been looking for that could cause such problems? I've been through errors.log and I get some i915 errors about invalid parameters but I'm not sure if those are "normal" or the cause of the lock up.

Booting through Fallback doesn't seem to do any difference.

Everything seems fine booting through Windows.

Thanks!

Last edited by raul_nds (2009-03-16 20:50:06)

mediumcool

Member

Registered: 2009-03-10

Posts: 8

Re: Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

I had a similar issue when I accidently set my display resolution in xorg.conf too high.  Another time it happend when there were issues with kde4 packages in kubuntu.

What desktop are you using?

Have you tried to start x from the command line into twm?  This could help find out if it is x related or desktop environment related.

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

I'm using KDEmod. I'm trying to install the vanilla KDE packages to see if it's KDEmod related. Meanwhile I'm using E17 and no lockups so far.

Thanks for the response

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

Well, at least I can log in now, and no freezes so far, but the login takes literally about 6 minutes with intense disk activity.

What bugs me is that it just started having these problems. Everything was working fine

pointone

Wiki Admin

From: Waterloo, ON

Registered: 2008-02-21

Posts: 379

Re: Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

Is your /home on an ext4 partition?

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/ … omments/45

---

M*cr*s*ft: Who needs quality when you have marketing?

Ranguvar

Member

Registered: 2008-08-12

Posts: 2,549

Re: Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

Just to head this off, because even though that's a good link, it's being misinterpreted by a lot of people: there is _no_ bug in ext4. The problem is that app devs got used to the behavior of filesystems that did not do delayed allocation (which speeds things up), instead of following the POSIX standard. XFS, ext4, and Btrfs now all do delayed allocation. What does this mean? If you want to be sure ext4 will not get all pissy at you when power is cut, add "nodelalloc" to your mount options in /etc/fstab. You'll lose some performance. Blame app devs. Kernel 2.6.30 will include more kludges that hurt performance less with hopefully the same effect.

Anyways. OP, have you cut power (not shutdown/rebooted properly) to your machine recently? Do you use one of the above-mentioned filesystems?

Last edited by Ranguvar (2009-03-17 03:36:48)

raul_nds

Member

From: Lisbon, Portugal

Registered: 2007-06-28

Posts: 258

Re: Almost completely screwed up system - need help troubleshooting

I think it was KDE related, since the lockups stopped since I switched to the Arch's repo. About the login, it was actually a Java problem that was segfaulting when starting the Strigi server (nasty little dependency)

Thanks for the replies guys.