Arch Linux

big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

"DoS"-like driving me crazy

Hi all,

Since some time, I have a really, really annoying problem with my laptop. Everything runs fine, but at some point, the HD will go crazy and nothing is responsive anymore. The only way to save it is to try to detect when it starts and before the computer is completely down and reboot it by pressing the power button (controled by acpid I think) or switching to a virtual terminal and hitting ctrl+alt+del for a reboot. Most of the time I am not fast enough and the computer does not respond anymore, with the harddrive activity led going crazy.

Now this problem happened since long ago, so it has been occurring with various kernels and user space. I cannot reproduce it: it happens randomly. I though it could have been a memory leak leading to swaping of everything else, so I disabled swap, without success. I checked all logs but saw _nothing_ suspicious. So it happens randomly and leaves no traces

I have tried gsmartcontrol but it did not find anything. I just think I could try a memtest...

Now I need help to diagnose the problem... I'm out of idea.

Here is my configuration:

Hardware:
Dell Latitude D830
Core2 Duo T7300 @ 2GHz
2 GB ram
120 GB drive partitioned like this:
  sda1: Dell utility
  sda2: Old, unused XP partition
  sda3: boot ~100MB
  sda4: extended
  sda5: 2GB swap (disabled)
  sda6: ~10GB ext3 /
  sda7: ~90GB ext3 /home
Intel X3100 (965 something, never understood the codes after)

Software:
x86_64
kernel26 2.6.30.4-1
xf86-video-intel 2.8.0-0.1
KDE 4.3 with kwin effects on
KMS with "i915.modeset=1" kernel option
Everything else up to date... Note that this problem is happening since a couple of months, at least. So its not only these versions that are affected...

Thanx a lot for your help...

Last edited by big_gie (2009-08-06 18:15:34)

Blind

Member

From: Desert mountain

Registered: 2005-02-06

Posts: 386

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

Hi big_gie,

I am using a Dell Inspiron 640m. I can remember that happening - suddenly the HDD light went one, and a little later, the computer would just hard freeze.
You are using the stock kernel?

When that happened to me (that problem went away after some kernel upgrade), I always thought there was a module loaded that interfered - think I changed the rc.conf to only load the modules that were really needed, and then it didn't happen. It sounds like a kernel thing.

Regards,
Blind

big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

Hey Blind, thanx for the tip.
That seems quite hard to accomplish though. The crash/freeze is so random: the laptop has been working fine since my post (no crash), but that day, I had 3 in a row with ~15 minutes to an hour between them...

I think it might be the video driver or the wireless one. I was able to freak out the video card by changing really rapidly pages in Okular with a scanned ebook (so no text, just images, big file ~40MB). Then I had that in dmesg:

[drm:i915_gem_object_bind_to_gtt] *ERROR* GTT full, but LRU list empty
[drm:i915_gem_object_pin] *ERROR* Failure to bind: -12
[drm:i915_gem_evict_something] *ERROR* inactive empty 1 request empty 1 flushing empty 1
ppdev0: registered pardevice
ppdev0: unregistered pardevice
ppdev0: registered pardevice
ppdev0: unregistered pardevice
ppdev0: registered pardevice
ppdev0: unregistered pardevice
[drm:i915_gem_object_bind_to_gtt] *ERROR* GTT full, but LRU list empty
[drm:i915_gem_object_pin] *ERROR* Failure to bind: -12
[drm:i915_gem_evict_something] *ERROR* inactive empty 1 request empty 1 flushing empty 1

and kwin compositing got disabled.

dakor

Member

Registered: 2004-03-19

Posts: 107

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

I also use KDE, and my lappy did the same thing when I used dolphin to browse my Movies directory. I turned off the preveiw option in dolphin and the problem went away.

---

freenode.net  #linuxn00b

lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

Install dstat from AUR and run "dstat -cdnpmgsf -M topcpu,topbio | tee some_file". Enable magic sysrq in /etc/sysctl.conf (kernel.sysrq = 1) and try using alt+sysrq+resub when your PC gets unresponsive. You should be able to a have a peek at dstat's output, either in the console (before reboot) or in some_file (afterwards), thus you should be able to see what causes the disk activity.

somekool

Member

Registered: 2008-08-27

Posts: 25

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

might be just a xorg intel driver bug....

I am having similar freeze issue. but I did not notice special harddrive activity.

see this bug under redhat is similar

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=486153

big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

Install dstat from AUR and run "dstat -cdnpmgsf -M topcpu,topbio | tee some_file". Enable magic sysrq in /etc/sysctl.conf (kernel.sysrq = 1) and try using alt+sysrq+resub when your PC gets unresponsive. You should be able to a have a peek at dstat's output, either in the console (before reboot) or in some_file (afterwards), thus you should be able to see what causes the disk activity.

Thanx lucke for the suggestion.
The problem did not resurfaced because I did not work on my laptop for a long time (well since that post).

I was able today to reproduce the problem. I will be as precise as I can be...

I have suspended and resumed my computer once yesterday evening. While suspended, I docked it. I then realized my keyboard did not have battery anymore, so I hot-undocked it. Now I have been working on a latex file compiled to pdf. To reproduce the problem, what I need to do is to view the pdflatex generated file in okular. I then open up a second pdf file (Chapter 2 of http://www.springerlink.com/content/q1377k/ ) and search for "spherical ha". I can't remember if I need to search the next occurence or if the first one is enough, but that triggers the disk activity. Everything seems to freeze, as if the system was swapping like crazy, even though I don't have swap enabled at all:

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2000       1433        567          0         14        517
-/+ buffers/cache:        900       1099
Swap:            0          0          0

The output of "dstat -cdnpmgsf -M topcpu,topbio" is located at http://pastebin.ca/1648014
(I started that command, in a virtual terminal, went back to X to toggle the bug, the came back in the console while checking the output of the command. Then switched to a second console where "ps aux | grep -i okular && pkill okular" was already entered and was waiting for the "enter" key to run.)

I have everything updated (kernel, X, whatever) from yesterday. KMS is still enabled.

Does the log tells you something?

Thanx a lot.

big_gie

Member

Registered: 2005-01-19

Posts: 637

Re: "DoS"-like driving me crazy

I have opened a kde bug report:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212305