Runaway X process freezes system
 

The problem is that X starts to use all the cpu resources and freezes the system.
Using top I get X using 98.9% of the CPU and memory. This started with SUSE 9.3 and seems to happen with a new install of SUSE 10.0 . Same problem if I am a regular user or root. I am using an Nvidia card with the SUSE Nvidia driver.
512 MB of Memory, P4 1.8, I can get into the system remotely and pkill X but I have to pkill it with pkill -9 I have tried ulimit and it hasn't worked.

Colour depth set 16 bit with an LCD 17 inch flat Panel

Happens with either KDE or Gnome. Using KDM. Keyboard does not respond but the USB Mouse moves on the desktop but has no effect. I have set up ttty1 with nice of 17.

3 D Acceleration turned off

Any suggestions? remove the Nvidia driver?:confused:

I do not run SUSE, however, here's what I would do if/when I have X problems:

1. Does /var/log/X86.0.log or /var/log/Xorg.0.log have any EE messages? (these are errors)

2. Make a backup of your /etc/X11/Xorg.conf or X86Config.conf configuration file and then remove your Nvidea driver
(if you are not using the 3D Drivers, it's not needed anyways)

3. Does SUSE have anything like dmesg to show you messages that may be happening in the background?

4. Have you added anything to ~/.Xinitrc or /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc or /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

5. can you try X --configure or Xorg --configure and see if the configuration wizard may fix it?

6. boot machine into runlevel 3, ie, run command: `init 3` as root. Once you are to a login screen, login as root and try `X -keeptty` or `Xorg -keeptty` which tells X to not detach from the terminal. This should show you what X thinks is going on...and should allow for Cntrl-C to break out of it if it goes haywire. (may want to add --verbose N to increase the messages going on.)



Since you do not yet have a specific error to help in the debug process, I cannot think of any more specific help to give. Hopefully, one of the above options will show you what might be wrong and if you do not know how to fix it, at least give you more information to post here for further help.