TerraNova 66 wrote:
For a while now, I have been having problems with my laptop (Acer Aspire 9400). It freezes up for 30 to 45 seconds on a fairly regular basis.This problem started with SuSE 10.2 and is continuing with 10.3 (soon to be 11.0).
It's most likely to happen when, after a period of time idle, I click on something or try to use the keyboard. It is most frequent when I am doing something graphics intensive, such as editing photos.
I've seen this sort of thing happen on my systems, too, even an AMD_64_x2 with 6 GB of memory. Sounds like it's related to graphics-related data, possibly swapped out to disk -- say the contents of a frame-buffer was swapped out of the graphics card into main memory..and from there, swapped out to disk swap space. POSSIBLY what is initiating this is the graphics card trying to access the swapped-out data in main memory, not finding it, and initiating main-memory page swaps ... but unfortunately, the kernel doesn't know in advance all of the memory that the graphics card is going to want... so it's a multitude of small swaps (each one of which also requires current resident memory pages to be swapped out to swap space before the requested pages can be swapped back in to memory)... and do your graphics card goes out to a non-resident page... memory manager identified it as being on swap disk...finds a page to swap out...swaps out that page, then swaps on the requested page... graphics card loads all the memory held in that page into the frame buffer...and probably a few more, because I think the swapper will pre-fetch a few more pages, too..in any event, it hits another non-resident page.... wash rinse repeat eventually, after 30-45 seconds, all of the memory shuffling and memory page-swapping is finally done, and your system freeze ends. Actually..the system isn't frozen...it's just your graphics display that's not doing anything. When it happens, it's frustrating as hell, I know (I experience it myself sometimes), because we EXPECT the graphics card to be immediately responsive at all times. In this case, what you need to do is: 1. DON'T PANIC (If need be, keep a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on your desk next to your monitor) 2. ACCEPT that this is a temporary situation...like trying to check into a hotel bfforet time...it might be a bit of time before someone has checked out and house-keeping has a room ready for you to occupy. 3. If (2) bothers you too much, do something with your time. Pick up that copy of the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, and read a bit of it.
When this freezing started, I added 512MB RAM to bring it up to 1GB, but it didn't make any difference.
It will merely make the behavior less frequent, but no, it won't eliminate it.
I believe the problem is hard drive related and I am including a part of /var/log/messages which shows what's happening during the time of a freeze. I am wondering if I should replace the current drive with a new one. The machine is currently dual booting WinXP and openSuSE 10.3
I think it's graphics-card related. IF it was disk-drive related, there is no logical reason for the entire graphics sub-system to completely freeze up, to the point that the display freezes even to the point where the mouse cursor won't show movement, and the clock on the KDE taskbar stops, too.
I think I know *what* is happening. Unfortunately I don't know *why* or *how* to fix it.
The times given below indicate a freeze of 11 seconds. However, it usually lasts longer than that.
There have been other posts here re: freezing, but they do not seem to relate to the problem I'm currently having.
------------------------------------------------------------------ Jun 16 21:18:51 copernicus kernel: ata1.01: qc timeout (cmd 0xa0) Jun 16 21:18:51 copernicus kernel: ata1.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen Jun 16 21:18:51 copernicus kernel: ata1.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0 Jun 16 21:18:51 copernicus kernel: res 51/20:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x5 (timeout) Jun 16 21:18:56 copernicus kernel: ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd1) Jun 16 21:19:01 copernicus kernel: ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset Jun 16 21:19:01 copernicus kernel: ata1: soft resetting link Jun 16 21:19:01 copernicus kernel: ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100 Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: ata1.01: configured for UDMA/33 Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: ata1: EH pending after completion, repeating EH (cnt=4) Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: ata1: EH complete Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 156301488 512-byte hardware sectors (80026 MB) Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 156301488 512-byte hardware sectors (80026 MB) Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 Jun 16 21:19:02 copernicus kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA ------------------------------------------------------------------
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