[Gllug] Linux freezing

[Christian Smith]

Matthew Joseph Smith uttered:

> Hi everyone,
>
> The problem is that the system keeps freezing.  The system becomes
> completely unresponsive, the mouse will not move, it doesn't respond to
> keyboard input, Ctrl+Alt+Del does not work either.  The only thing you
> can do is simply switch it off.  I am generally a KDE user and have
> noticed it most when using Kopete, but perhaps that's just because I use
> it a lot.  This morning, I tried the live-CD version of Ubuntu, and it
> froze within a minute of opening Firefox.  It always coincides with my
> interacting with the system: I've never left the system, come back and
> found it unresponsive, nor has it frozen during a long compile job, such
> as Qt.


I recently noticed a similar problem, and having discounted hardware 
problems (the machine was still alive and on the network) I noticed what 
appeared to be a spinning Xorg.

My problem appeared to be down to the new scheduler being used within the 
X.org server, that is flaky and contains race conditions. Starting the X 
server with -dumbSched appears to have fixed the issue.

This involved updating gdm configuration to pass the -dumbSched argument 
when starting the X server. On my gdm based installation, this involved 
appending to /etc/gdm/custom.conf:
[servers]
0=DumbSched

# Also note, that if you redefine a [server-foo] section, then GDM will
# use the definition in this file, not the defaults.conf file.  It is
# currently not possible to disable a [server-foo] section defined
# in the defaults.conf file.
#
[server-DumbSched]
name=DumbSched Server
command=/usr/bin/Xorg -dumbSched

So check it out if your computer still appears to be otherwise alive.

Christian


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