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.
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