[gentoo-user] Freeze up during X session

[gentoo-user] Freeze up during X session

[Harry Putnam]

I'm experiencing a problem where during an X session the machine
inexplicably freezes up... networking along with mouse keyboard etc.
No access is then possible via ssh or any other way other than a hard
reboot. 

I've attempted to debug the problem by first searching the logs.  But
not finding anything I recognize as a clue.

I've  inserted a line like this in /etc/syslog.conf
cat /etc/syslog.conf 
 [...]
 *.*                     -/var/log/debug.log
 [...]

and then created a tiny script called by cron every 5 minutes that
simply pinged an external host and reported the results by way of
piping to `logger', guaranteeing it would appear in the system logs .

Then after a freeze up and reboot, search the logs for the most recent
successful ping and see what happened after that.  (The freeze up freezes
networking too so the ping would then fail).  And Hopefully I'd see
something of note between the last successful ping and the reboot.

But I see absolutely nothing of note.

The freeze does not appear to obey any particular time frame after a
boot, only that sooner or later a freeze up will occur.

Apparently there is nothing happening that merits a log entry. 

Its been going on for a goodly while and I've just been rebooting as
needed ... I haven't been really active on the machine for a while so
it was easy to get along with, but now I need to do more work and so
the problem is a major stumbling block.

Re: [gentoo-user] Freeze up during X session

[Helmut Jarausch]

On 14 Jan, Harry Putnam wrote:
> I'm experiencing a problem where during an X session the machine
> inexplicably freezes up... networking along with mouse keyboard etc.
> No access is then possible via ssh or any other way other than a hard
> reboot. 
> 
> I've attempted to debug the problem by first searching the logs.  But
> not finding anything I recognize as a clue.
> 
> I've  inserted a line like this in /etc/syslog.conf
> cat /etc/syslog.conf 
>  [...]
>  *.*                     -/var/log/debug.log
>  [...]
> 
> and then created a tiny script called by cron every 5 minutes that
> simply pinged an external host and reported the results by way of
> piping to `logger', guaranteeing it would appear in the system logs .
> 
> Then after a freeze up and reboot, search the logs for the most recent
> successful ping and see what happened after that.  (The freeze up freezes
> networking too so the ping would then fail).  And Hopefully I'd see
> something of note between the last successful ping and the reboot.
> 
> But I see absolutely nothing of note.
> 
> The freeze does not appear to obey any particular time frame after a
> boot, only that sooner or later a freeze up will occur.
> 
> Apparently there is nothing happening that merits a log entry. 
> 
> Its been going on for a goodly while and I've just been rebooting as
> needed ... I haven't been really active on the machine for a while so
> it was easy to get along with, but now I need to do more work and so
> the problem is a major stumbling block.
> 

A few months, ago, I had similar symptoms.
It turned out to be a defective AMD Phenom CPU
(a very tricky error since all hardware tests passed)
I guess it's a cache coherence problem (the Phenom has 4 cores).
Luckily it was quite a new machine so my dealer
replaced the CPU. The problem didn't occur ever since.

While searching the net for a reason of failure I came accross
messages about failing graphics chips / or graphics drivers.
Perhaps you try an open source driver for your graphics card
and see if the problem still occurs.

(Before I suspected the CPU, I have tortured memory and I have
even replaced the motherboard)

To "exclude" a software problem, try booting from a 
SystemRescue-CD
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

It's Gentoo based and sports an X-Server.

That are the problems that makes one crazy!

Helmut.


-- 
Helmut Jarausch

Lehrstuhl fuer Numerische Mathematik
RWTH - Aachen University
D 52056 Aachen, Germany

[gentoo-user] Re: Freeze up during X session

[Harry Putnam]

Helmut Jarausch <jarausch@igpm.rwth-aachen.de> writes:

> To "exclude" a software problem, try booting from a 
> SystemRescue-CD
> http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
>
> It's Gentoo based and sports an X-Server.

Thanks for the recue disk tip.

> That are the problems that makes one crazy!

Well put... hehe.

But I chickened out and took the path of least resistance.  I'm in the
middle of an install from scratch right now.  But if its hardware as
yours was... that won't help either.   

My hardware is not amd so keeping my fingers crossed.