[SOLVED] frozen xfce session

vonbiber · 04-25-2013, 06:13 AM

I recently got a lenovo laptop (T 430S).
A couple of times while I was on xfce the system would
freeze and none of the Alt+Ctrl+Bkspace or
Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to the root terminal or even
Ctrl+Alt+Del would work. I'd have to turn off the power.

When this occurred I had firefox open (with at most 3 or
4 tabs) and one or two X terminals, a mounted external
hard drive...
My RAM is 4GB, the graphic card is an Intel
and the system is slackware 14.0

Problem is I'm afraid it happens randomly. I was wondering whether it's software-related or some faulty hardware.
Does anybody have a clue?
Thanks

Richard Cranium · 04-25-2013, 10:26 AM

Probably faulty hardware. Did you try running memtest on that machine?

vonbiber · 04-25-2013, 01:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Richard Cranium

Probably faulty hardware. Did you try running memtest on that machine?

I just did. I turned off the machine after a couple of hours. It seemed to go forever.
Anyways, it seems memtest did find errors:

Code:

Memtest86 v4.2.0     Intel Core i5-3320M @2.60GHz
.........                                Errors: 65535+
....                                               Test   Errors
Lowest Error address : 000280f7000 - 640.9MB          0        0
Highest Error address: 00028180ffc - 641.5MB          1        0
....                                                  2        0
Max Contiguous Errors: 65535+                         3    65535+
................................................................
..................................................... 7    65535+
...............

Richard Cranium · 04-25-2013, 07:40 PM

Yeah, memtest will run until you stop it. For some memory errors, you have to run it a long time for the error to show up.

vonbiber · 04-26-2013, 04:37 AM

Now, I'm not so sure.
I remember having pressed the Escape key at one point,
and that's when I got these errors.

This time I let it run for 2 hours without pressing any key.
So far there were no errors detected.

The thing that confused me was this message:

Code:

Pass complete, no errors, press Esc to exit

I thought that would exit the program.

To make sure I ran memtest for over 9 hours and it didn't detect any errors.
So it seems the RAM is okay.

And I'm stumped.

vonbiber · 05-07-2013, 06:51 AM

Yesterday I tried something else.
I built and installed linux-3.9.0

It's still too early to say, but so far I didn't get any problems in my X-sessions.

Still, I'd like to know what was the problem

vonbiber · 05-16-2013, 05:23 AM

I found this info at
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Intel_HD_Graphics

Quote:

For T430 with Intel HD Graphics 4000 I experienced random screen freezes,
that disappeared only after upgrading kernel to version 3.5 and Xorg driver
to version 2.19.

Well, I didn't upgrade xorg driver, but since I upgraded kernel
(currently running 3.9.2) I haven't experienced those random screen freezes.

chess · 05-16-2013, 08:40 AM

I had same lockups with the default kernel in 14.0 but I upgraded it to 3.8.x and have not had any issues. I did not upgrade any of the xorg bits either.

nebloof · 05-16-2013, 09:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chess

I had same lockups with the default kernel in 14.0 but I upgraded it to 3.8.x and have not had any issues. I did not upgrade any of the xorg bits either.

I had the same exact issue. I'm running a core i7 desktop with 16GB RAM.
Installed Slackware 14 on a spare hard drive 4 days ago, and it would lock up after 1-20 minutes.
So I downloaded kernel 3.9.2, the huge config from Slackware repositories online, and compiled that.
System is stable and doesn't lock up anymore!

So you probably just need a newer kernel.