Tejas Guruswamy said the following on 07/20/2011 04:52 PM:
When it freezes, do the kernel magic sysrq keys work? Alt+PrintScr+"r,s,e,i,u,b" should semi-safely reboot the machine
Sometimes. Not always. (but then some don't do anything anyway!) (this is a laptop. It would take another hand to hit {r,s,e,i,u,b} after holding down the Alt+Fn at one end of the keyboard and the PrntScr at the other end of the keyboard.) Sometimes I'm in one application and it sort-of works. If I'm in a xterm I can issue commands, unless the whole thing is irredeemably frozen. But I can't change windows to the browser or mail reader, the menu won't pop-up and the clock in the panel bar isn't 'ticking'. That 'frozen' clock is a good sign that its locked up in some way. No 'sometimes' about that! Or perhaps only the cursor moves. Sometimes. Or perhaps the cursor doesn't move but everything is frozen. Sometimes. Sometimes Ctrl-Alt-backspace works to reset and I log in again. Then again, sometimes it doesn't. Everything is frozen and the the only way out is the hardware off. Sometimes. Sometimes it _seems_ to be triggered by a gross action such as trying to close a window or a tab, something that causes a massive screen redraw. But then again, other massive screen redraws such as flipping virtual desktops or 'present desktops' or the pop-up for composing a new mail message or sending it, or the darkening of the background whole-screen window when a foreground pops up DO NOT seems to cause the freeze. No 'sometimes' about those operations. I've become paranoid and when the laptop boots I SSH in from another machine to start with :-) If that is dead, if the laptop isn't returning pings then its hardware off time. The point I'm trying to make is that there are a variety of degrees of lock-up/freeze. I have no specific ideas about what triggers them. I suspect the GPU. Perhaps there is a specific bug, some 'optimisation' about a specific type of redraw ... that's why I posted the snippet from the log file. And no, after the event, after a reboot or restart, I can't find anything in the logs that gives me additional clues. Is there something I can do to make xorg produce ore logs, even at the cost of performance?
-- best to avoid the hardware off if possible.
+1 :-) I do when I can. Sometimes I can't. Sometimes.
Does it respond to a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X, or Ctrl-Alt-F* to switch VTs? If yes, maybe only X is breaking; if no, it's probably a kernel or hardware issue
Sometimes. Oh, ctl-alt-F* hasn't seemed to worked for me at all on 11.4 -- Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Eudemian Ethics -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org