XOrg freeze that affects a lot of people

[Anton Markov]

Jeremy Kolb wrote:
> The problem stems from something weird with AGP.  I had to set my AGP to 
> 2x in my bios.  Since then, no crashes.  It's been happening for at 
> least the past 3 or 4 nvidia driver versions.
> 
> Jeremy

I would agree that this is related to AGP or some other part of the 
memory handling code. It appears to happen with programs that do lots of 
drawing to the sreen. For example, scrolling in a browser, opening 
KDevelop, Quanta, or another KDE application that appears to repaint the 
toolbars a hundred times, etc. I also find that the crash is far more 
likely to happen with xcompmgr running, which further suggests it has to 
do with the image copying code.

I've tried setting the AGP speed to 1x in the xorg.conf file, and it 
makes the problem less likely to happen; I'll try changing it in the 
BIOS too.

It is interesting that there are no error messages printed in the Xorg 
or system log, even if I manage to shut down the computer cleanly.

> 
> 
> Charles Goodwin wrote:
> 
>> There is an XOrg freezing problem that is afflicting a _lot_ of people.
>>
>> The typical symptom is that when using Firefox the screen will freeze
>> although the mouse cursor will still move.  However, it's not limited to
>> Firefox, having experienced it with gvim myself and seen multiple (but
>> less numerous) reports of the issue when using Opera and Konqueror.  (A
>> little strange that it's mainly browser usage that induces the freeze.)
>>
>> You can still ssh in and kill X to recover the computer sans rebooting.

Once again, it is weird that the keyboard can not be used to kill the 
Xorg server; often not even Alt-SysRq works. Would a driver problem lock 
the Xorg server so badly that it doesn't let the kernel see the 
keyboard? Or is it the CPU usage that prevents keyboard events from 
being read?

>>
>> It has been reported with XFree86 too.
>>
>> The problem is in fact driver related.  It afflicted me when I upgraded
>> to the most recent (7167) proprietary nvidia drivers, and downgrading
>> fixed things for my desktop.  Many of the sufferers use Ati cards and
>> there appears to be no standard version of the Ati drivers that works,
>> much more problematic than the nvidia drivers where version prior to
>> 7167 seem to have generally been stable for the majority of users.

Yes, the ATI drivers have been suffering from this problem to a varing 
degree since at least Xorg 6.8 (that's when I started using Xorg).

>>
>> It seems to be limited (from what I've seen) to the 2.6 Linux kernel.
>>
>> Why is this really relevant to XOrg?
>>
>> Well, I described the high-level symptom.  The low level symptom is that
>> a message not dissimlar to this occurs in /var/log/everything/current:
>>
>> Mar 18 12:50:48 [kernel] NVRM: Xid: 13, 0000 02005600 00000056 00000c28
>> 01be0078 00000080
>>
>> And instantly XOrg freezes and consumes 99% of the CPU.
>>
>> I'm just curious as to whether it might be possible for XOrg to catch
>> whatever-the-problem-with-the-driver-is and gracefully handle it.  If
>> this were possible, even if X were to exit and give a nice error which
>> could be used to debug the situation (by reporting the error to the
>> driver developers), it would save a lot of pain for a lot of people.
>> Most users are left having to do a hard reboot (since a lot of new Linux
>> users are tech savvy enough to use ssh) and many get disillusioned and
>> end up going back to whatever-OS they used before.
>>
>> Sources:
>>
>> * Official nvidia forum thread on the issue with the latest drivers:
>>     http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=47502
>>
>> * Gentoo forum threads (to illustrate the wide-reaching base of people
>>   affected by this problem:
>>     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-198023.html
>>     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-231134.html
>>     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309020.html
>>
>> I could dig up endlessly more links on complaints about this.  The only
>> solutions I've ever seen are to upgrade or downgrade to driver x.y.z or
>> to disable RenderAccel in xorg.conf.  I also believe this problem comes
>> in more guises, having seen more varied issues reported as being fixed
>> by these solutions.  Also, this is a problem that has been ongoing for
>> (at least) up to a year, judging by the reports I've come across.
>>
>> I know this is all a bit vague, but it's difficult to give any kind of
>> info other than the experience / solution(s) unless it's actually
>> happening to a developer.
>>
>> - Charlie
>>
>> Charles Goodwin <charlie at vexi.org>
>>

-- 
Anton Markov <("anton" + "@" + "truxtar" + "." + "com")>

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