Arch Linux

Billy Anachronism

Member

Registered: 2004-11-16

Posts: 13

Help! soft and hard lockups are driving me nuts

Hey guys and gals I'm having a very annoying problem and Its very bizarre.
I hope this problem hasn't already been covered a million times but...

I'm getting lockups in a lot of apps.. Firefox, openoffice, gaim and its just like my system becomes lagged or something. Its never happened before. Happens especially when I use text fields and scroll around and use bookmarks in Firefox. OpenOffice hardly runs anymore.
Before you ask, its not a memory or cpu usage problem, I sit on a max of 90mb/439mb and I never get high cpu usage when these stalls happen. I also don't see any error messages from the programs.

As I noted before.. its something funny with text input, I notice it especially with leafpad where I no longer get a vertical line that shows where my text is up to. Also as I'm typing this it isn't blinking.

Woah, weird. I think its somehow related to nedit being open. I've been using it pretty constantly the last couple of days and I've had it open while I've had other programs open. Maybe its stealing the cursor from other programs and causing them to halt?
Bizarre.
I'll do some more testing.

If anyone has heard of anything like this please inform me.

Thanks.

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Help! soft and hard lockups are driving me nuts

Is loopback being enabled on boot? Check with ifconfig.

That caused heaps of stability problems in everything for me once.

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: Help! soft and hard lockups are driving me nuts

Do you use the NVidia driver, and have you updated to the latest version recently? The latest version seems to be buggy. Disabling the RenderAccel option in xorg.conf helped me.

Dusty

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Billy Anachronism

Member

Registered: 2004-11-16

Posts: 13

Re: Help! soft and hard lockups are driving me nuts

I am using Nvidia and I did update it recently. I presume disabling RenderAccel won't hurt much as I'm not using composite at the moment anyway.

i3839

Member

Registered: 2004-02-04

Posts: 1,185

Re: Help! soft and hard lockups are driving me nuts

I have it too, and know exactly what causes it...

If you copy text in Nedit, Firfox will sort of freeze. My personal workaround is to avoid copying and only use selection as muhc as possible when I want to use both. But when copying anything in Nedit anyway I just click on the locationbar (or ctrl+l), do shift+left/rightarrow to select some text and then copy that with ctrl+c, to overwrite Nedit's copy and solve the problem.

Apparently there aren't that many Nedit users, as I never read about it before. I thought I was the only one having this problem. I hope it goes away when I update everything, if not I'll need to look into it.

skoal

Member

From: Frequent Flyer Underworld

Registered: 2004-03-23

Posts: 612

Website

Re: Help! soft and hard lockups are driving me nuts

Billy, you see Dusty's avatar?  The finger is pointing to the RenderAccel option in your 'xorg.conf' file.  If it ain't 'nedit' causing it, I'd follow the direction of Dusty's 'compass'.

If you occasionally notice some 'tearing' on your screen, the RenderAccel is the culprit.  Sometimes the 'tearing' wasn't always visible in the past, but I would get those same lockups just as you describe while using this option.