System freezing frequently

[Robin Laing]

Chris Kurecka wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been running Fedora since the project began (and Red Hat before
> it), but all of a sudden for the past month or two, my system has been
> freezing.  It seems to be more likely to happen if it has recently
> happened, so if my PC is on for 6 hours without issue and then
> freezes, it might freeze again 30 minutes later.  This is on Fedora 7,
> and I don't think it happened in the test releases, but can't be
> completely sure.
> 
> The main symptom is that everything becomes unresponsive.  Both the
> mouse and keyboard fail to work (so I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or
> Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.), and the mouse doesn't do anything.  Often (but I
> don't think it happens every time), the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock
> lights start blinking rapidly once the system is frozen.
> 
> I'm running an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and GeForce 7300GS.  I'm using the
> regular x86 version of the distro rather than the x86_64 build at the
> moment, but I've gone back and forth between them over the years and
> don't see why that should be the issue.  I first noticed this with the
> "nvidia" video driver and compiz, so I disabled compiz.  The freezing
> persisted, so I then further switched to the main "nv" driver.  The
> freezing is continuing to occur.
> 
> I found an obscure bug mentioned online that some people have with
> AMD's Cool & Quiet (or something like that) for power management, so I
> tried disabling that in the BIOS, but that also did not fix things.
> 
> For what it's worth, the issue also happens in Ubuntu 07.04 on a
> different partition, though I use that much more rarely.  I have the
> GNOME System Monitor applet in my panel, and it looks like CPU0 goes
> to near 100% when the system is frozen, and CPU1 is maybe 20-50%.  The
> hard disk light also seems to be blinking rapidly.
> 
> My inclination is to think that it's something related to the kernel,
> since it seems to have to do with the CPU spiking, but I have no idea.
>  I've gotten my PC to freeze when using Firefox, Evolution, Pidgin, or
> just Nautilus.  It doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing at the time.
> I don't think it's a hardware issue, but I can't be sure.
> 
> I would greatly appreciate any help or suggestions.  I'm not sure why
> this has started all of a sudden.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Chris Kurecka
> 

As you are running a Nvidia card, you are having similar problems to me 
and many others according to the nvidia bug site.  Forget about filing a 
Fedora bug due to the nvidia driver.

If you can ssh into your machine, you will most likely find Xorg running 
at close to 100%.  No messages will show up in the xorg.log or messages 
about this as there is nothing really wrong to report.  I have gone 
through this for ages.  I have not had a total freeze with the latest 
kernels which is good.

I found that I can push the xorg to a high percentage rage but no 
freezing using the nv driver and running a video in mplayer (from CLI) 
while mplayer stays quite low.

I have found reports of similar issues with other video cards and 
drivers, even the open source drivers.

Just this morning I read about a patch to the nvidia driver for the .23 
kernel and some have reported that if they compile a kernel without cfq, 
all lockups and xorg issues disappear.

Not what you wanted to hear but it points in the right direction.  There 
was another post I read this morning about changing the windows manager 
to metacity.

Yes it is frustrating and it is hard to find the problem.  I have tried 
to trace it down with strace the best I can with my limited knowledge on 
debugging faults.

-- 
Due to the move to Exchange Server,
    anything that is a priority, please phone.
Robin Laing