Arch Linux

avojevlavo

Member

Registered: 2010-05-27

Posts: 40

x crashing or maybe compiz? (dr.house needed :) )

well, first I have to say I am not entirely sure it is x related but given the symptoms it is my best shot.

so this it how it goes: I start my system, work and after 15 or so minutes blue squares begins to appear, see screenshot, after one hour arch becomes really unstable and choppy and eventualy crashes down.

the weird thing is that it appeared rather slowly, few weeks back the blue squares started to pop but only rarely and I could work for hours and it didnt crash it was only after two weeks that it crashed and that was maybe after six or seven of heavy rendering in blender

main reason why I think its x bug is the fact that if I manage to alt+f1 to terminal before my system crashes, login goes fine but after that my keyboard starts missing letters I have to type most of them twice (this is while gnome session is still running at tty7) and if I kill xorg it goes back to normal, but when I start x again I maybe have like 15minutes before it crashes again. Oh and when I start x as root (I know not a good idea) with the basic window manager without compiz and decorator it works fine for any period of time. I have even contemplated hw issues (although I think its unlikely since its new notebook only 1y old) because after hour or so of work and the eventual crash I restart and I get those 15minutes before it crashes again, so i have to turn it off and wait for half and hour before I can start it again.

I am running gnome 2.32.0, compiz 0.8.6, emerald and it seems that transparency and icon resizing effect in gnomeDo (docky) makes the blue squares goes all over the place

hw: lenovo g550, nvidia gf g210m (nvidia driver 260.19.12; X Server 1.9.0 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0, Current version of pixman: 0.18.4)

any ideas? or did I just miss something obvious

Bregol

Member

Registered: 2008-08-15

Posts: 175

Re: x crashing or maybe compiz? (dr.house needed :) )

Well, with it having a shorter period of time before it crashes again, it sounds like one potential thing could be overheating a component; when you wait a bit it cools back down and you have longer without issues.  With it being OK when you don't run composite, it is potentially graphics.  So one option could be graphics overheating, causing artifacts (blue squares) and eventual crash.  May not be the only possible diagnosis, but seems to be an option.

You could check to see if it is hardware by sticking in a livecd and trying to make it crash.   Maybe find a livecd that has some stress test / benchmark programs on it and use that.  See if running a graphics benchmark in particular makes your computer unhappy.  If it survives the livecd, it is more likely to be something in the software rather than hardware.  You could also peek in your xorg log and see if that gives any indication of trouble.

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