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SuSE 9.1 Freezes Momentarily Must Reboot
I have only been trying to run SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal for 3 days. I am completely new to Linux. I have reformatted and re-installed 4 times, but always have the same issue.
The installation goes perfectly and I get no error messages. The program generally loads fine, but does freeze up occasionally. Once running, everything is fine, until the system freezes. Usually, the freeze is only for a few seconds...the clock on the taskbar stops....then starts again, but I am unable to do anything after the freeze. I must reboot. When the freeze occurs, if I am using the default browser or Firefox, I get no connection for my high speed cable connection. Again, no error message. The freezing may occur within a few seconds of a reboot, or a few minutes...or an hour. The freezing will occur whether or not I'm using any application. I have a few minor problems, but overall, the Linux is great, if I can overcome the freezing problem. My system: AMD XP3000+ MSI KT6V Motherboard 512M PC 2700 RAM 80 G Western Digital 7200 RPM Caviar Hard drive Nvidia FX5200 - 128M Video Card If I reinstall Windows XP Pro, I have no issue with freezing up. This only occurs after performing the SuSE Linux 9.1 installation. I really would like to learn the Linux system and switch over completely. I have removed Windows XP from my system and only have installed the Linux program. Thanks in advance for any assistance. zenarcher |
has the freezing happened to any other OS? possibly a hardware issue?
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I have switched back to the Windows XP O/S and do not have the problem. Then, reformatted and back to Linux...and the problem occurs again. I built the system myself, and build custom systems and repair PC's for a business, so am fairly familiar with the current hardware. I find no hardware issues, when running testing on hardware, but I suppose there could be a configuration issue with hardware and Linux. All hardware seems to work fine...printer by USB 2.0. The only non-working hardware is the USB connected Sony CLIE S-360 PDA. As I understand, it is supported by SuSE Linux 9.1, but I suppose I haven't figured out the configuration on that, as I can't get SuSE to recognize or Hot Sync.
zenarcher |
I should also mention that I have the latest BIOS update in the motherboard and have downloaded all updates shown via SuSE YAST. Chipsets are: VIA KT600 North Bridge and VIA VT8237 South Bridge. If the system unfreezes by itself, which often occurs, I no longer have my ethernet connection.
zenarcher |
i have a question.
i am a newbie also that someone recomended SUse 9.1 to try as a newbie.. but i have some questions... is SUse9.1 personal a live cd like knoppix std? or do i have to install it to my hdd? i started downloading SUse9.1 Personal and saw that there were different kinds like Suse 9.1 Personal, SUse 9.1 Professional and SUse 9.1 Live...what is the differnece with them? |
I'm not really skilled with SuSE, but I think I can answer your question. You can find the difference between Personal and Professional if you check on the SuSE website. Professional comes with a lot more features....and considerable more cost. I think what you call the "Live" CD does allow you to try SuSE Linux without installing on the hard drive.
zenarcher |
At boot up type
acpi=no as a boot parameter. |
I did find in the log an issue with powersave. I think that is what you are referring me to, but not sure. Per the Warning in the log, I went to /etc/sysconfig/powersave/common and changed the default line to:
POWERSAVE_CPUFREQD_MODULE=off If you are referring to another change I should make, please advise how to add your suggestion to the boot, as I am really new here...and not sure exactly how to add it to boot. Any details would sincerely be appreciated. Thanks, zenarcher |
I am having a similiar problem with my laptop, that I posted on this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...postid=1175053 I would really love to have this fixed, as I love having SuSE 9.1 on my laptop instead of Windows XP, but having it randomly freeze multiple times a day is no fun. It's also impossible to leave it running overnight, obviously.. However, did have a question, If I disable ACPI on my laptop, wouldn't that be a BAD thing? zenarcher: To set "acpi = no", go to YaST, System -> Boot Loader Configuration -> Edit Configuration Files button at the bottom, then it should be in there. If you look under the failsafe settings, it shows an example of where it's included, add this to your regular bootup entry. I removed the "cupsd" service a bit ago, per someone elses obscure posting about a runaway cups process freezing their system, so if my machine freezes again, I'll give this a go as well... |
Happily, I have found a solution. I wasn't getting any suggestions, really, on several forums, so decided to try different flavors of Linux. Finally, I tried Mandrake Linux 10....it installed perfectly.....runs without any errors, freezing or anything else. I don't know what the differences are in the different flavors of Linux....but I can say that after trying 3 or 4 flavors, all with the same problems...Mandrake solved the issue. Now, if I can just learn the secret of downloading, saving and installing software with Linux, I'l be a happy camper. I did find step-by-step instructions for installing my NVIDIA FX5200 driver...and it works flawlessly.
zenarcher |
Interesting.. I removed CUPS from my machine yesterday, and it ran for about 18 hours before finally locking (though again, it doesnt 100% lock, just 100% cpu which makes the keyboard/mouse unusable..) Ultimately, I have to hard reset.
Anyway, I have two more things to try, first will be turning off acpi, then the last will be doing a clean compile of the latest kernel on the machine... If neither work, I may sadly ditch SuSE for a different distro as well.. Did you try the acpi=off suggestion? |
Yes, I did try the acpi=off, which made no difference. With my system....the freeze occurs like this: The freeze can occur at any time...often, while nothing is open...just sitting at the desktop, however, the problem intensifies if you're browsing...and it doesn't matter which browser you're using. I notice the clock in the lower right...will freeze on a time...then, will begin running again...freeze again....run again....etc. During the moments of freezing, the mouse will not move. After the first freeze, you can no longer open or close any program....and you cannot contact a website. The only way out of the freeze is a hard boot. Everything then boots up normally. Sometimes, in rare instances, the boot up will freeze but this does not happen often. At times, the freeze will occur after only being up and running for a few seconds or minutes....other times, the freeze will not occur for a couple of hours or longer. Usually, it would freeze when the screensaver was running.
This same problem occurred with SuSE Linux 9.1, Mandrake Linux 8.2 and the current Fedora Linux. Since I wasn't expecting success with Mandrake 10, I merely swapped out my hard drive with a fresh one...and installed the Mandrake 10. Much to my surprise, everything ran perfectly. I then reinstalled my regular 80 Gig 7200 RPM Western Digital Caviar hard drive, formatted it and installed Mandrake 10, just as I had done with the other Linux software. Again, Mandrake 10 installed perfectly and has run perfectly....not a glitch......not a freeze...nothing. I am very pleased. At the moment, I'm running the Mandrake Linux 10 free edition. I wasn't about to spend money buying various flavors of Linux until I found one which would work properly. I'd end up with a very large and expensive library of Linux which wouldn't work. Since this is working so well, I'll probably buy the Mandrake 10. The free edition did not have the drivers for my NVIDIA video card, but I installed it from the NVIDIA website, folllowed instructions and it works fine. I also performed all the Mandrake 10 updates and all is great. If you continue with the same issues, I'd suggest trying the Mandrake 10....which was suggested to me...and which is working. zenarcher |
Thanks for the info. I really hate to ditch SuSE, as I'm a huge fan of it, and have grown quite accustomed to the ease of use of it.
However, I am at wits end with this situation, and frankly quite tired of dealing with the freezeups. I'll probably give Mandrake 10 a try here a bit later, hopefully their network install is as easy as SuSE's was... |
Much of my reading led me to try SuSE, as well. If it's any consolation, I'm thrilled with Mandrake. I think it is every bit as user friendly as SuSE, if not moreso. Easy to install, easy to update and quite clear and understandable. Since my little bit of experience with Linux was primarily rebooting with SuSE....I can only compare the two as to ease of use...and have to say Mandrake is great. I have a lot to learn, but Mandrake is nice. I consider myself to be reasonably competent at understanding instructions....I worked in engineering related fields for about 25 years....I own a small computer repair business....and have worked with MS O/S since DOS 5.0....but Linux is an entire new ballgame...and I am happy to be working on the learning process there. I totally understand your frustration...I spent all my time with one hand on the keyboard and the other hand on the reset button with SuSE. I hope you'll give Mandrake a try and have the same success I've had.
zenarcher |
It's interesting so many have noticed this problem.
I've been using Linux for years now. After my last motherboard burned up ( PC Chips M.B.) I picked up a new Gigabyte M.B. (7VT600-RZ). My old Linux installation (SuSE 8.2) was too out of date to support all the new features on the mother board and I was tired of recompiling my ALSA drivers after every kernel update. So I switched to SuSE 9.1. I had to fight it a bit at first but finally got things up and running. Now after a month or so I start noticing the freeze-up others have mentioned. It seems to only happen when I'm running Enemy Territory (an awesome 3D FPS online game). I've tried different desktops and have the same problem, so it's not KDE. My desktop will freeze and then after a few seconds will come back to normal. After doing this a few times, it will freeze completely. When the desktop freezes, the keyboard is unresponsive so pressing ALT-CTL-Backspace or ALT-CTL-DEL do not work. I have the luxury of having several computers on my home network. When the freeze occurs, I can still SSH into the "Frozen" computer. The only thing that unfreezes it is killing X with a 9 signal. e.g.: killall -9 X When X restarts, everything is back to normal for a while. A complete reboot gives the same results. I really want to figure this out so let's take a little survey. If your machine freezes answer these questions: 1 - Are you using an Nvidia graphics card and Nvidia drivers (not the nv driver but the nvidia driver). 2 - What CPU? I am running an Athlon Thunderbird with a standard x86 kernel (not the athlon kernel). 3 - What chipset does your M.B. use? Mine has the KT600 and VIA 8237 bridges. 4 - Onboard LAN? IF yes, what chipset (I have VIA 6103L LAN Chip)? I really suspect the Nvidia driver but I'm trying to see what is common. Please help me out be responding. Thanks!!! |
Wow, that describes EXACTLY what happens to me.. It freezes, but not really.. CPU hits 100%, and pounding keys on the keyboard does nothing.. HOWEVER, If I press the power button once (not holding), it will kick through the power down sequence, temporarily unfreezing things.. for a couple seconds.. sometimes I can even move the mouse and change desktops, click applications, however, the keyboard does NOT function, and most applications are mostly hung. Using the system bar at the bottom of course does not work. I haven't tried SSHing into it because I use the builtin wireless and my wireless router blocks all requests from my other subnet.
I am using a Fujitsu Lifebook N5010, which has the following specs: P4 3.0ghz cpu (w/ hyperthreading) 768MB ram Some toshiba 60gb hd (very very slow drive, compared to todays standards.. quite sad in this package..) ATI mobile 64mb graphics card/chip/whatever I noticed it had some SiS chipset stuff on it, though I dont really know which pieces at the moment.. Finding out the exact components on this machine has been a great pain in the neck.. If there's a command I can run to get a sysinfo dump, let me know and I can get the results from that :) So, it's definitely NOT isolated to the nvidia chipset, because I am definitely having the same problem :( If it's any help, it seems that it's more likely to freeze with a lot of HD activity, eg, if I'm FTPing files or the like, with a lot of disk IO, it has a high frequency of freezing.. Or so it seems.. Oddly, I tried installing Mandrake 10 earlier, and was getting some hda: lost interrupt errors, and it would never hit the install proc.. I did some researching, and used> linux noapic and it fired right up, but instead of installing, I rebooted back into SuSE with this boot option, and it still hung anyway.. So that's not it in my case.. :( I am praying to the linux gods for help on this, because I really don't want to go back to windows.. :( In the meantime, once my son gets done watching a video on my laptop, I'm going to try installing Mandrake 10 and see what I can see.. |
It seems we have similar systems.
1) Video Card NVIDIA FX5200 -128M AGP 2) AMD XP3000+ Processor 3) Chipset KT600 and VT8237 Onboard LAN VT6102 Rhine II Motherboard is an MSI KT6V zenarcher |
Well, I tried Mandrake 10.. It installs amazingly easy and fast.. <10 minutes and I was up and.. er.. running?
It doesnt detect or support my wireless (built in) out of the box. Very discouraging.. I don't really feel like messing with installing some non-distributed software just to get it to work, when it worked out of the box with SuSE 9.1 Think I will try reinstalling SuSE 9.1.. Again, and just keep messing with it.. I never did a recompile of the kernel like I planned, so perhaps that may help.. |
Well, I'm glad you have a bit of an opportunity to experiment around. Too bad your ethernet is not detected. As I understand, the free copy of Mandrake does not have all the programs, possibly some of the drivers and so forth, which are on the copy you can purchase. Possibly the driver is on that set. You might also check the supported hardware list on the Mandrake website...I had a printer that wasn't supported....so traded out with the HP T45 my wife was using..and put my Windows only printer on her system. Problem solved.
zenarcher |
Well, I have a wired port on it also, of course, but it's just irritating that it's not recognized, at all, by Mandrake..
Perhaps the network install is smarter, I'm not sure, but I'm guessing not. I saw other posts on here from people with Atheros wireless cards that expressed disdain over it not being auto detected. I am reinstalling SuSE 9.1 over the network now, actually :) Usually goes pretty darn quick, <30 minutes for the install. After all the researching I've done, it looks like the bug is in fact a serious bug not with distributions, but with XFree86 or KDE. Seems the common denominator is always those conditions. If you check out some posts on the FreeBSD groups, you'll see some similiar reports of this freezeup.. Coincidence? One person even responded with "you picked a bad time to use -current".. Here's to hoping that is the case, and it's fixed soon. How has your system been so far? Still rock solid? Have you tried any I/O intensive applications yet? |
Well, that is interesting about the bug and all of the people with the problem. Perhaps with so many people having the issue will motivate someone to correct it. I know that SuSe has a means of allowing my Sony PDA (S-360) to sync, although I couldn't get it to work, either. Mandrake does not, at least in the downloadable edition. I'm assuming somewhere along the way I'll find a way to do that. Otherwise, everything continues to work perfectly. I removed the unsupported Lexmark printer and installed the supported HP printer and it is working great. I haven't tried any really demanding I/O programs yet...however I have tried to rapidly change websites, while browsing, which really caused SuSE to freeze...and no problem. I've done some downloading and transferring from my CD backup and no problems. I've not had the slightest indication of hesitation or delay in any application I've used. I think this one is going to work fine. As I say, the same issue occurred when I installed Mandrake 8.2, which is the older version, so I don't know what to say about that one. I just know the Mandrake 10 is doing everything I could expect.
zenarcher |
Well that's cool, definitely keep me updated if you can. I'd really like to solve this riddle.. If I absolutely cannot get SuSE to work a bit more solid, then I'll probably give it a try (after more preparations to download stuff that doesnt work out of box).
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I am using 9.1 successfully (I know you don't need to hear that). I've installed 9.1 on Toshiba Centrino based laptop, AMD64 desktop and an Duron desktop. The problems I've experienced have all been with the Toshiba but none as bad as you describe. I have done 32 and 64 bit installs on the AMD64 and upgrade (from 9.0) and new installs on the Duron.
1. Keyboard Freeze The only problem I have had is with the Toshiba. I've experienced freezes during install and freezes during operation. The freezes during install essentially were no keyboard response. The operational freezes are keyboard freezes. Hitting keys at random does not free it BUT hitting Ctrl + Shift + F2 does and then it works fine. The freezes I have seen occur during typing only. There is a fix on the SuSE site which drops the hardware interval clock timer rate to 100 ticks from 1K ticks. 2. Network Freeze I have power management enabled which works great EXCEPT! When I unplug the ethernet from the building network and wait longer than a few minutes the system freezes, it is responsive to key strokes Crtl Alt F1 gets me to a command prompt but can do nothing their either. Ctrl Alt Delete is set to reboot and that works. The issue there is the same on Microsoft had/has with suspend/resume in Win2K and WinXP, the ethernet driver does not properly obey the ACPI spec. The trick to make it behave perfectly is the same trick on Windows, stop the network first. (ifdown eth0 - for example) 3. CPU Chip Behaviour SuSE 9.1 introduces better ACPI, better but not perfect. Earlier versions of Linux would not speed step and the CPU's would run much hotter. I've not seen any problems as a result however if you have a component that is thermally sensitive - example the internal WiFi Lan Card in some notebooks, to a failing CPU fan at the other extreme you may experience hangs as a result from thermal slew rates. My wife is a complete Linux Newbie and needed a high end graphics tool. She is happily using SuSE 9.1 on the Duron using GIMP. I'll re-read the thread but, from my experience, I've had problems on certain linux distros (Lindows, Debian) and not on others (SuSE, Gentoo). Sometimes Windows does better on flaky hardware, sometimes Linux does. As long as the hardware is reasonable I have not had a problem with Linux. cheers ted |
njaguar,
Just checked your config and noted the use of wireless. Have you tried disabling the wireless and using it hardwired? I note it's not Centrino - good - cos that's flaky even on 9.1. (I use an orinoco pcmcia plugin with no problems) I'll check the other forums 'cos I think I may have seen a keyboard freeze thread in my wanderings on that box. Finally that's a hot cpu chip, does the power management start up OK? There is a bug in SuSE during startup where they load bits of one power management and bits of another and you get this message about starting powersaved but it won't 'cos you have cpufreqd running etc. ted |
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I actually had some cheeky problems with Windows on this machine, though not at all related to what I'm having under linux.. Under windows, the HD would go nuts, accessing 100% like a floppy drive, bringing the system to it's knees.. I don't know if this was related to some garbage auto update SP2 crap or not, but it made me so mad I removed Windows, and haven't put it back on since... I've never experienced any problems like that under SuSE thus far... I'm 99% sure it's not a faulty hardware problem, because far too many other people have reported this same issue for it to be caused by faulty hardware.. It seems most people give up completely and resort to going back to Windows, from most of the threads I've read... |
(Posting from my laptop)..
I see no error messages in dmesg regarding any power problems... Here's the top lines regarding ACPI tho: Code:
Using APIC driver default |
Still no crashes yet.. Haven't tried using any BitTorrent applications yet either though.. Perhaps the overload of continuous I/O usage from these applications is the real culprit? But again, why? I always considered linux to be extremely stable, it certainly shouldn't be crashing during heavy load, or whatever is caused by using an application like BitTorrent..
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More testing done
As I promised, here's some more information.
I'm pretty sure now my freezing up problem is due to problems with accelerated AGP use. I entered: Option "NvAGP" "0" into my XF86Config file and experienced no freezing that evening. Enemy Territory ran noticably slower with a much lower fps rate but without freezing up. I then tried to prevent agpgart and via_agp modules from loading at boot and was only able to do this by renaming the modules. WHERE DO THESE THINGS GET LOADED AT BOOT? I checked modules.conf, modprobe.conf and even tried blacklisting the modules in /etc/hotplug/blacklist. Only renaming them prevented loading. I then changed the Nvidia driver to use Nvidia AGP by setting: Option "NvAGP" "1" in my /etc/X11/XF86Config file. The Nvidia driver fired up its AGP (as verified by looking at /proc/drivers/nvidia/agp/status). Enemy Territory caused the desktop to freeze almost immediately. Just as a fluke, I tried changing the default color depth in XF86Config to 24bpp. I normally run at 16bpp. I restarted X and fired up the game again. It ran for several hours with only brief periods of freezing and my frame rate was back up again. Tonite I'm going to try reloading the apgart and via_agp modules and setting the nvidia driver to use these (Option "NvAGP" "2") with 24bpp color depth to see what happens. Another thing I should mention is that Nvidia's documents on it's Linux driver mention that mother boards based on the VIA chipset have adjustable AGP drive levels and there is a range of settings that work best with Nvidia cards. I'm going to try playing with the AGP drive level setting in BIOS over the weekend to see if that helps. Maybe what I've tried so far can help someone out there. Let me know if it does. I'm going to report back after I make the changes I mentioned. Good Luck, YeeHaa4LINUX |
Interesting, except in my case, I'm using ATi. However, the supplementary guide DID mention that ONLY 24bit is supported. I also changed my resolution to this (have not installed the supplementary drivers) and I had zero problems with Cedega running Diablo II (which I did on my previous install).
So far, no freezes yet.. About 35 hours and counting.. :) I still haven't used any BitTorrent applications, however, so perhaps it was just THEM that was the problem, as I mentioned before.. Maybe someday X will be as solid as the rest of linux, even with crappy video drivers. :) |
Still Freezing
Ok,
I've tried EVERYTHING I could find and my system still freezes (see previos postings). Even with the NvAGP option set to zero, eventually the desktop freezes. I've messed with everything from mother board settings to XF86Config to acpi, apic and many other kernel options. I still get the freezing problem. The only thing that works.......... using the nv driver instead of the nvidia driver. The nv driver works problem free but without 3D acceleration that I need !!!! Here's my final options: 1 - Reinstall the latest driver from Nvidia's website one more time. If this works, I'll need to rebuild the driver everytime the kernel gets updated. 2 - Try another Linux distro. I have Fedore Core 2, Mandrake 10, Debian (various) and others. Maybe this will make a difference. 3 - Replace my Nvidia based PNY GeForce 4 MX 420 AGP card with an ATI 9200 card. ATI cards up to the 9200 have native Linux drivers that will do 3D. Cards above this need ATI's drivers which I hear are not too good. I'll let you know how it turns out, YeeHaa |
I'm still going strong, no freezes... But, no BitTorrent applications still. Seems like I may have found my "solution"...
I'm still puzzled as to what it is about those applications that causes a system freezeup/panic.. |
freezes
Have anybody tried to turn off the screensaver?? ;)
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I have mine set to off (blank screen), but I have no idea how to turn that off as well (ie, don't go to blank screen)..
Still no crashes, btw, so I'm 99.9% sure it was caused by BitTorrent. |
SOLUTION FOUND ! (At least for me)
Hello again,
I tried eveything I mentioned in my previous postings. Latest drivers, another distro of Linux, playing with BIOS setting, etc. The only thing I did NOT try was changing APIC to PIC and assigning all the IRQ's manually. I went out and purchased an ATI Radeon 9200 AGP (8x) card. I removed my Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 420 AGP (4x) card. I removed the Nvidia drivers and reconfigured X to use the ATI driver and DRI/DRM. This is the Linux native ATI driver and the 9200 is the newest card that can use it. No more proprietary drivers until "the man" addresses the issues and fixes the problems. And now....... No more freeze, no more laggy video and Enemy Territory never looked or played better. I glad I spent the $99 (U.S.) for this card. It's AGP port speed is double my old Nvidia, it has twice the memory and does not require a fan (less noise). Also, my frame rate is up during game play. I'm sure you were hoping for a better solution than buying a new video card but that's what worked for me. Hope this information helps someone, YeeHaa |
periodic freezes ...
The original poster indicated:
I should also mention that I have the latest BIOS update in the motherboard and have downloaded all updates shown via SuSE YAST. Chipsets are: VIA KT600 North Bridge and VIA VT8237 South Bridge. If the system unfreezes by itself, which often occurs, I no longer have my ethernet connection. zenarcher I also have a VIA chip set computer. I loaded SuSE 9.2 and it would periodically freeze. The same computer with Mandrake 9.2 also would freeze. SuSE support helped me quickly solve the problem. I did have to add acpi=off to the boot parameters. More than a week and no freezing. Depending on what I was doing with Mandrake it could be 4 or 5 days before a freeze or sometimes longer but it would freeze. If you later get a freeze with Mandrake check if acpi is still the cause. Hope this helps someone. |
Where do you set the acpi=off option?
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acpi freeze setting off
If you are using SuSE, when you re-boot there is a screen that gives you different options and there is a location where you can type any parameters. At that place type acpi=off .
If you are booting with a different system you may get a prompt > or something like that where you could type > linux acpi=off Kind of depends on what system you have. You can also set this as part of your grub / lilo settings. Take a look here as well: http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2002/10/81_acpi.html |
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