Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

bram85 · 2010-07-11 11:19:34

The other day I upgraded the kernel to version 2.6.34 and at the same time xorg-server to 1.8 (along with input drivers and video drivers). From that moment, I suffer from random freezes, the system is completely locked up; the screen doesn't blank, though. The system appears to be perfectly fine, but after some minutes it will freeze.

As far as I can remember, the freezes only occur when using a webbrowser. Chromium is my default browser, but also Firefox and Konqueror caused the system to freeze completely when I want to open a webpage. Other network programs such as irssi can run for hours and they didn't seem to cause any havoc.

At first I thought this might be caused by some instability in the latest xf86-video-ati driver, so I downgraded back to xorg-server 1.7. Still the same symptoms, so I am pretty sure now there's something in the kernel. So I went back to xorg-server 1.8 and downgraded the kernel to 2.6.33. So far, the system hasn't let me down, yet. Also, I uninstalled the madwifi packages on my system so I'm using the ath5 drivers shipped with the kernel. That change doesn't seem to make a difference.

I am not exactly sure what exactly could cause this, there's no trace in any log file to be found. My suspicion is that it's network related.

The hardware is a Thinkpad T42 with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 (r300) chip and an Atheros wireless card.

Anyone else with similar experiences with this hardware? I can't think of a way how to properly debug this. I know I can bisect, but that's time consuming and perhaps it's quicker to ask around first before I walk down that road. Any suggestions are welcome on how to track this down.

riivo · 2010-07-11 14:56:24

I have the same problem with exactly the same hardware

Thinkpad T42 with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 (r300) chip and an Atheros wireless card.

It's probably the same issue that was also brought up in this topic

dt · 2010-07-15 07:55:01

Well i have an ATI Technologies Inc RV350 [Mobility Radeon 9600 M10] and similiar issues, but it does take much more time to freeze and until now it did only do so, when I was interacting with the laptop. It is up for 12 hrs without any problems atm, which is only a matter of time I guess.
e: well it lasted till today.. when i was using firefox

Last edited by dt (2010-07-19 13:06:50)

Woodgypsy · 2010-07-20 15:33:58

I have the exact same problem -- both Firefox and Chromium seems to freeze my laptop. Also, it appears to be especially likely when I have many tabs open.

However, my laptop GPU is Nvidia (GT230) and wireless card is Intel - so. I suspect that this is Kernel-related problem.

karol · 2010-07-20 15:35:51

Does any of you have any interesting logs?

archman-cro · 2010-07-20 20:49:35

Woodgypsy wrote:

I have the exact same problem -- both Firefox and Chromium seems to freeze my laptop. Also, it appears to be especially likely when I have many tabs open.

+1 here too.

jackjackk · 2010-07-21 09:54:46

Hi folks! Same problem here!
The last time the computer froze, the Xorg process was on the top of the "top" listing, with a 30% CPU usage. Then none of the opened windows got updated any more. Apart from the intermittent working of the mouse motion, the rest of the system was unresponsive.
I'm using a Toshiba Satellite A100-159 with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 (through the xf86-video-ati driver).
I'm running Archlinux along with Gnome and Metacity.

Possibly related software packages (just a loose guess!) and the version I have:
kernel26 2.6.34.1-1
xorg-server 1.8.1.902-1
xf86-video-ati 6.13.1-1
gnome-desktop 2.30.2-1

Thanks in advance to whoever will cast some light on this apparently random (and a little bit frustating) behaviour,

Giacomo

Woodgypsy · 2010-07-21 11:01:36

By the way, I looked through /var/log, but I didn't find anything interesting

Fedora 13 seems to have had similar problems, when they were on 2.6.33 -- I am not sure if it is related or not
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=245752

Many Ubuntu 10.04 users have been reporting random freeze since 2.6.32 -- again, I do not know if this is related or not
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1478787

I am on Sony Vaio CW laptop (with C2D and Nvidia), running 64bit Arch, KDE, Ext4. I haven't had any issues prior to recent updates. Thanks.

mcqr · 2010-07-23 07:16:23

It look like I have the same problem using ubuntu and kernel 2.6.34-020634-generic on Thinkpad r50e. Nothing interesting in log file.

olaf42 · 2010-07-25 22:50:46

I have same problem with notebook Asus A4000.
After random amount of time computer freezes. Usually while browsing in Firefox, but several times it happened using other aplications. Freezes are more frequent when CPU is under load (rendering webpages,that uses flash).

I have Ati Mobility Radeon 9700 (r300)
Pentium 4
and latest packages (pacman -Syu)
also haven`t found anything useful in logs

Leonid.I · 2010-07-26 00:18:40

karol wrote:

Does any of you have any interesting logs?

I double that. Linux doesn't usually go down silently. A content of everything.log right after the crash would be interesting to see...

Last edited by Leonid.I (2010-07-26 00:19:12)

bram85 · 2010-07-26 07:04:40

If I had a clue what goes wrong I probably wouldn't have raised this issue here. I'm also used to the fact that Linux leaves at least one pointer behind where things went wrong, and I'm a bit surprised as well that this is not the case. Perhaps a stack trace is printed on the Linux console, but there's no way to reach that after the fact.

It's a strange problem and perhaps I should resort to bisecting the kernel.

jackjackk · 2010-07-26 09:06:08

At least in my case, playing around with the KMS setting apparently affects this behaviour. In particular, with KMS enabled (by default) I have no more random lock ups, while disabling it (with the option radeon.nomodeset=0 in /boot/grub/menu.lst) I experience the lock ups. Actually I had it disabled when the problem appeared, because KMS had been creating other problems... does this behaviour happen to anybody else?

Last edited by jackjackk (2010-07-26 09:13:04)

bram85 · 2010-07-26 09:12:54

I have KMS enabled with these freezes, so I guess your case has a different cause (or KMS is unrelated).

For me it will be difficult to bisect the kernel in the next 10 days or so, so if anyone has too much spare time on his/her hands, go ahead.

dt · 2010-07-26 20:13:43

I nearly thought, the problem fixed itself but it didnt.. Finally after 'cat somefile' it froze again. I tried to ssh in as suggested in the fedora thread, but on the other machine i got the message no route to host, so I had to do a hard reset again.
here is my everything.log after the crash.. (as requested)
Since its a little too much for a post.. https://pastee.org/s35sc

Last edited by dt (2010-07-26 20:17:56)

Leonid.I · 2010-07-26 21:56:28

@td:
But can you post the same right before the crash?
Also, I wonder if your problems are related to tpowa's gcc 4.5 prerelease (for 2.6.33 it was just (gcc version 4.5.0 (GCC) ))... there used to be some problems with -O2/-Os optimizations.

dt · 2010-07-27 16:05:36

Well the only entry not looking completely usual is the following..

Jul 26 16:10:27 ¬¬ kernel: ati_remote 3-2:1.0: Unknown input from channel 0x09: data 90,90

And that was about 4 hours before anything happened.
Everything else in between were just regular lines from crond..
I use lxde btw, in case that matters somehow.

Leonid.I · 2010-07-27 16:27:57

Yeah, not much.

So, if you suspect the kernel, then the halts should occur purely in the console mode, right? Otherwise it's the graphics driver...

Also, it seems to me that your BIOS is doing something funny -- from your dmesg.log:

no hardware sampling interrupt available
weird, boot CPU (#0) not listed by the BIOS

nomorewindows · 2010-07-28 17:24:34

The last time I used arch was to do the updates, just got back to using it and crash!
Mine boots up to the point of the UDev events, but when I change the boot line to use /dev/sdxx instead of the /dev/disk/by-id/ xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I go to the next step where the video mode changes, then it freezes. Half the other time it would stop at udev and either blank out totally or just stop. I don't even get a full bootup (standard or fallback). My other archs boot just fine.

--------------------
Downgraded the kernel to the immediate previous kernel before .34 and booted upto the point of the window manager, so I think it's a problem with either the video driver or the xorg, because they were both updated at the same time, but the kernel may be a bit buggy also. (Of course, using the chroot and the arch install CD appropriate for my arch). Also, it only shows up on one screen on the dual headed setup, which makes obvious which one isn't working.
---------------------

When the kernel calls the videomode (same one that can be called from kernel command line), that's when it is dying. The only machine I'm having trouble with is the same one that will be the only one to do any updates, maybe this will fix the problem.
----------------------
The updates didn't make any difference. It still hangs at the videomode change. Was able to get a read out one time that one of the video cards had wrong ROM contents?
-----------------------
Have had to use the top level ftp.archlinux.org just to get the most recent updates, without having to fish through mirrors.

My presumption is that the kernel/video hardware is just not working in console mode or the graphics mode.

Strangely enough both of my hardwares, one is a mobile intel 945 and the other is a desktop 945. The mobile works without a hitch, and the desktop freezes.
------------------------

Last edited by nomorewindows (2010-08-15 21:23:56)

vootey · 2010-08-02 12:44:55

I have the same problem with my Gentoo-Installation since 2.6.34 kernel. (no log either)
Using an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 card and xf86-video-ati driver.

I also tried the vanilla-kernel-sources 2.6.35_rc6, but no change.

Doing a deeper search shows, that not just a few people experience this problem.
I found a site summerizing this issue (at least I think, its this issue) for ubuntu (and forum links): http://www.iol.ie/~stuartneilson/Bootup_fsck.html

Last edited by vootey (2010-08-30 16:46:55)

cngn · 2010-08-03 11:18:25

these random freezes become a little conspiracy theory by now, multiple distros affected, i wasn't doing any software related manipulation besides updating arch

however i've replaced my usb mouse with a ps2 mouse and added a fan to my passive graphic card, i'm not experiencing any freezes so far, looks like a hardware problem for me, try unplugging your usb devices and check if it still freezes (at least for me, i was always moving my mouse while freezing)

Last edited by cngn (2010-08-03 11:26:46)

hqxriven · 2010-08-03 23:50:14

I'm using the google translator ... sorry for bad English.

In Ubuntu, Fedora and Archlinux noticed the problem.

But in opensuse with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8 does not had any problems.

What is causing the problem?

I also noticed that the cheatcode acpi_skip_timer_override helps a bit ...

But in opensuse 11.3 is not necessary

Woodgypsy · 2010-08-12 04:46:40

With the new kernel (2.6.34.2 -- I had to change my mirror list to get the update, but that is the different story), so far I am getting no crashes. Good work on update!

riivo · 2010-08-13 19:24:10

The problem is still there with kernel26-2.6.34.3.

dt · 2010-08-14 16:28:52

the problem persists for me too with kernel 2.6.35-2. still no logs. I didnt have sshd running, but my guess is, it wouldnt have been accessable like the last time anyways. I will test it again on the next crash.
e.. yep, not accessable at all.. -.-

Last edited by dt (2010-08-17 17:52:08)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-07-11 11:19:34

Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#2 2010-07-11 14:56:24

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#3 2010-07-15 07:55:01

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#4 2010-07-20 15:33:58

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#5 2010-07-20 15:35:51

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#6 2010-07-20 20:49:35

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#7 2010-07-21 09:54:46

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#8 2010-07-21 11:01:36

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#9 2010-07-23 07:16:23

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#10 2010-07-25 22:50:46

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#11 2010-07-26 00:18:40

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#12 2010-07-26 07:04:40

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#13 2010-07-26 09:06:08

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#14 2010-07-26 09:12:54

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#15 2010-07-26 20:13:43

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#16 2010-07-26 21:56:28

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#17 2010-07-27 16:05:36

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#18 2010-07-27 16:27:57

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#19 2010-07-28 17:24:34

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#20 2010-08-02 12:44:55

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#21 2010-08-03 11:18:25

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#22 2010-08-03 23:50:14

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#23 2010-08-12 04:46:40

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#24 2010-08-13 19:24:10

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

#25 2010-08-14 16:28:52

Re: Random freezes with kernel 2.6.34 and xorg 1.8

Board footer