Arch Linux

ring_zero

Member

Registered: 2011-04-15

Posts: 4

Intermittent hangs and freezes

Firstly Thank You for whatever help that you may be able to provide.  I know that a lot of people that answer questions on this forum are busy professionals, and you time is valuable.  Thank You for sharing it with us all. 

On to the issue(s) at hand.

I am experiencing temporary freezes, on Arch Linux x86_64.  Running it on a Toshiba Satellite C655D.  I have used many other linux based distros on this very machine with no issues at all.  After the machine POST, and boot processes complete, and the console login screen appears, there is a temporary hang.  The cursor stops blinking, and then everything returns to normal.  After starting X, the system will run for a while, and then it will lock up once again.  After a few seconds, the system becomes useable again.  Another interesting anomaly that occurs irregularly, is that X will simply die.  The screen goes black, but the backlight is still on, and never recovers.  I am not having any of these issues on a server that is running Arch x86 on an i686 architecture.  The graphics card is an ATI, but I am using the Open Source driver package labled xf86-video-ati.  Temporary system unresponsiveness also occurs when using wicd to connect to wireless networks.  I am at my wits end, and have researched this exhaustively over the last two weeks or so.  I have reinstalled the system three times, and checked and re-checked system files to no avail.  I am new to Arch, but not Linux or any of the BSD's.  I really like Arch, and would like to continue using it, but I am seriously considering moving back to any of the five or so other flavors of Linux that I have used on this machine that don't produce this class of error.

Again thank you for you time and any help that you can provide.

lagagnon

Member

From: an Island in the Pacific...

Registered: 2009-12-10

Posts: 1,087

Website

Re: Intermittent hangs and freezes

First of all have you have tried running a Live Linux CD to confirm that you do not have a hardware fault that has manifested itself since you installed Arch? If you still get such faults with the Live CD it would confirm a hardware fault.

Have you analyzed your system logs (all of them) in /var/log to see if you are getting any strange errors there? (especially check "dmesg" and /var/log/Xorg.0.log).

Have you recently upgraded and only experienced the faults after the upgrade?

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,785

Re: Intermittent hangs and freezes

Have you looked through your logs for clues?

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ring_zero

Member

Registered: 2011-04-15

Posts: 4

Re: Intermittent hangs and freezes

I have looked through the logs, and did not see anything suspicious.  Yes there are several live cds that I am able to use to boot the machine, and they do not show any issues, or at least make them apparent.  I have used PCBSD, Ubuntu Maverick, Ubuntu Lucid, Gentoo, and BT4r2 on this machine without any issues whatsoever.  I believe that if it is a hardware isssue it is likely residing in the kernel somewhere.  I was more or less curious as to whether or not this behaviour was completely unheard of.  Looking for a direction to go in which to fix it.  ACPI is acting a little strangely, or at least I am 90% sure that it is ACPI, as now, when waking from an extended suspend the machine can only be accessed with a hard reboot.

ring_zero

Member

Registered: 2011-04-15

Posts: 4

Re: Intermittent hangs and freezes

Well, I did not want to, but I broke down and uncommented "testing" in pacman.conf, and all of the problems have gone away after recacheing the pacman db and performing a global upgrade of the whole system.  I also uninstalled acpid and laptop-mode-tools, then re-installed them both.  This *seems* to have corrected most of the issues that I was having.  Oddly the last time that I did this, X slit it's wrists on me, at least when I tried to enable compositing.  I added the line "radeon.modeset=1" to menu.lst, and this issue seems to have been resolved as well.  There is still the irritating five to fifteen second pause at the console login however, but I am not seeing the cpus rev to 100% periodically while runnning X on an idle system anymore.  I am also not experiencing temporary system hangs in X either.  Hoping that ACPID doesn't vomit the next time that I try to suspend for a few hours...  Thank you for the suggestions guys, I promise you I went through all of the logs before posting, and the only thing that I saw was an error about firmware for the video card that I have in this machine.  The error was there because I had temporarily disabled KMS to see if that was part of the issue.  It was not.  Interestingly the NUM LOCK key no longer works...

Thank You, once again,

RZ

Last edited by ring_zero (2011-04-16 01:21:25)