I have a clean install of Slackware 14.2 64 bit and using xfce. Every now and then, input from the keyboard will pause, and mouse will be ignored, and the display freezes EXCEPT I can still move the mouse. This pause lasts 1-3 seconds, an occurs maybe once a minute or every couple of minutes. It doesn't seem to happen at regular intervals, at least not that I've noticed.

I have 16GB ram and when this occurs there is plenty of free memory. I swapped out both hard drives with new drives not long ago, but that didn't change anything (the old drive starting throwing bad blocks and had a lot of hours, so I figured it was

I recompiled the kernel, changing preemption to low latency desktop, and deadline block i/o scheduler (personal preference), disabled a few features that aren't applicable to my system (vendor specific stuff, hardware I don't have, etc.) but it did not change anything.

There is nothing running in the background that I'm aware of, dmesg shows no errors of any kind. I'm kind of at a loss of how to proceed. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Hello,

I suggest to check if that issue can be reproduced with slackware live-dvd, and, if this is the case, with other live-dvd: manjaro 16.06.1 which uses a 4.4 kernel, and knoppix 7.6.0 which uses a 4.2 kernel.

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SeB

So I installed the 4.7 kernel, but the nvidia drivers would not compile the kernel module. I backed it down to the 4.6.5 kernel, and the nvidia drivers installed just fine. And I no longer notice this intermittent freezing.

But the weirdness is not over. After a while I loaded up a spreadsheet in LibreOffice 5.2, and I noticed *very* poor performance, making it unusable. Strange thinks I. So I loaded up LibreOffice 5.1, which I knew from prior experience worked just fine. Same performance problems. But other things perform just fine - gpu intensive games work great, no performance problems, disk i/o is fine, etc. Now I'm thinking there is some weird kernel version interaction with LibreOffice, though I don't really know what or how.

So I tried OpenOffice 4.1.2, same spreadsheet, and it is lightning fast. Now I'm starting to hear the twilight zone theme playing softly in the background.

My current status is that switching to a different kernel version with the same .config fixed the intermittent freezing. Doing so, however, broke LibreOffice, but OpenOffice works fine.... OK, I can always use OpenOffice, it works well enough and gets the job done.

I'm not aware of anything else, so far, with any kind of performance problems.

the 4.6.x kernel has been very buggy for me with GTK3 Apps they all seems to be very sluggish, no idea why.

I dropped it down to the 4.4.16 kernel, and LibreOffice is still sluggish. I dropped it back to the 4.4.14, no change. Tempted to blow it all away and do a clean install with Slackware 14.2 and start over again.

I'm wondering if it would be worth the effort of dropping down to a yet older kernel? Or if Slackware would work with, say the 4.1.29 kernel?

I have dropped back to 4.4.14 and now libreoffice and other apps is fluent again, but i have a clean install of 14.2. maybe something from your old slackware is causing this for you?

I know forum member Darth Vader has said he uses 4.1.x in his 14.2 machines without issue. Apparently 4.4.x has been buggy on his machines as well.

As far as I know, there shouldn't be any major repercussions with running a 4.1.x kernel other than losing some new hardware support (I think the big additions were for Intel graphics).

Thank you for that! I will indeed try the 4.1.x and see how it works. My hardware is a year+ old, so there should not be any dependencies on a newer kernel.

Either I screwed my install, or there are some interaction problems with the newer kernels. I wasn't paying attention, and I dinkered with too many thing, to be sure at what point I started having problems.

I'm going to do a wipe and clean install of 14.2, see if I observe problems, and then try a 4.1.x kernel and see if that fixes it. And this time I'll pay closer attention to my steps and see what breaks/fixes things.

So after all is done and said...clean install of Slackware 14.2. Switched to 4.1.29 kernel to eliminate problems from newer kernel. Using same nVidia video driver as before. And LibreOffice - specifically calc in a small spreadsheet - performance is so poor it is unusable.

There remains only one thing that is changed from when this used to work, and that is I'm using the current version of Slackware 14.2. With Slackware current from about a month ago, and Slackware 14.1, this worked fine. I have some Slackware current boxes from a month or so ago, and it works fine, as well as some Slackware 14.1 boxes. Now I'm looking at recent changes to 14.2 as the possible culprit because I've eliminated just about everything else. To test this I would have to revert to Slackware 14.1, which I really don't want to do.

But as near as I can tell everything else is working OK. OpenOffice calc works just fine. I have not yet experienced the freezing of the gui like I was before.

And I'm again hearing the twilight zone music playing in the background. What could have changed with 14.2 in recent weeks that would cause severe performance problems with LibreOffice calc?

Edit: PaleMoon 64 bit won't run on the current version of Slackware 14.2 either....this likewise worked with current from a month or so ago, as well as 14.1. Still looking for some common factors.

I bit the bullet and rolled back to 14.1. And I'm using the prior nVidia driver, 367.27. LibreOffice 5.1.4. This is a configuration that I've used for a long time and it is known to work well.

And everything works as expected. No weird gui freezes. No sluggish calc spreadsheets. PaleMoon works. Everything is as snappy as usual.

Twilight zone music fades a little. A day wasted, back to where I started, but at least my system is usable again. I think I'm going to relegate Slackware 14.2 to the ban list for a while, until I have another day to waste trying it again. Sadly, this isn't the first Slackware release that did not work for me, but the last time I got bit was with some of the 10.x releases, so I have become complacent...

Apologies for going on and on and for any confusing reports. Here are my conclusions to date based on a weekend spent experimenting and testing:

1) LibreOffice calc 5.2 is broken. At first I thought this was associated with the other performance problems I was experiencing as they all occurred at the same time, but successive testing on different machines has confirmed that this particular problem is with LibreOffice 5.2 itself and seems to be unrelated to any kernel versions or any Slackware versions. LibreOffice 5.1 (as well as Open Office 4) both perform as expected. LibreOffice 5.2 calc performs very poorly on all machines using both 3.x, 4.4.x, and 4.6.5 kernels, both Slackware 14.1 and 14.2.

2) Something was changed with Slackware 14.2 that introduced slight but noticeable performance problems. The average user might not notice, but When doing side by side testing of clean installs of Slackware 14.1 and 14.2, this becomes obvious. It isn't severe - a one second pause here, a two second pause there, and those that are really slow with keyboard/mouse might never notice it. I notice them specifically at:

1) login - a pause between entering user id and being asked for password. While this is no big deal, Slackware 14.1 does not do this. I mention this simply because of the difference between the two version as it might be related.

2) The gui (while running xfce) pauses intermittently - for a second or two, everything freezes. I have several 14.1 boxes and none of them do this. I have confirmed this on a clean install of 14.2.

3) Certain operations that read a directory, most noticeable when using the Midnight Commander and changing into a directory, results in a pause of about a second. It doesn't do it very time, just often enough to be noticeable.

4) This is an interesting change - the game Ark under Slackware 14.2 has moderate performance problems. I didn't notice how pronounced it was until last night when I finally had time to play it under 14.1 and I realized how much difference there was. Ark is resource intensive and performance is marginal at best, but the differences were pronounced.

5) PaleMoon browser is broken on Slackware 14.2. This does not appear to be related to the kernel version as it works fine on Slackware 14.1 with the 4.6.5 kernel. With Slackware 14.2, the 64 bit segfaults immediately, no logs, no messages. Not sure what is causing it, but it works fine on Slackware 14.1.

I'm still testing different kernel versions, so I'll hold off on commenting on whether or not I think the above is kernel related with the exception of PaleMoon - that breakage is specific to Slackware 14.2.

The unanswered question is - is this specific to my hardware somehow? Is anyone else noticing this? When I have a chance I'll load 14.2 onto a few more boxes and see if I can answer this question.

Spent the day with Slackware 14.1 and the 4.6.5 kernel. No performance problems at all. Whatever is causing the above mentioned problems, it does not appear to be the kernel.

I see a lot of messages about intermittent freezing. I do not know if this will help, but I use the nvidia driver from nvidia.com, and I have, for a long time, included the file /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf:

Also, in the kernel options, there was some kind of memory leak test option that is highly disruptive if it is enabled, and can cause intermittent freezing. In .config, these options are:

So, I disable it. I used to disable it at runtime in my rc.local file with:

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In my case was also the Kernel, DRM Initialization Death even on a bare initrd. Not that the freezing stopped. It appear, but not that frequently.

So, I suspect the entire graphics stack, from Kernel to last bit of Mesa, on Radeon HD4450, Radeon HD6450, GeForce 210 and GeForce 6200, on a range of processors from Pentium 4 to Bulldozer x8 and a range of memory from 2GB to 16GB.

Slackware. No experiences on Slackware64. Looking back to that epic mess given by my computers, I wonder if maybe P.V. tried to suggest us, in a delicate manner, that is time to abandon the 32bit ship for its 64bit equivalent...

PS. The last Mahican which still struggle with Slackware 14.2 is right now a dual-core Athlon 7850, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD6450 1GB.

PS2. I'm very sure that's something about graphics stack. On a server (style) installation, aka old good VGA console, no X11 fancy, Slackware 14.2 works perfectly fine, in my opinion.

Glad it's not just me....

I checked the default kernel config for both 14.1 and 14.2. Some interesting if not particularly meaningful stats:

There were 259 entries that appear in the config for Slackware 14.1 that do not appear in the config for Slackware 14.2, and 912 entries in the 14.2 config that do not appear in the 14.1 config. Considering the difference between the kernels, this is not unexpected. What I was more interested in what had changed, and there are 44 things in the 14.1 kernel that were changed in the 14.2 kernel: The number of cpus was changed from 128 to 256, and the rest consists of things changed to/from module/built-in. Nothing really interesting there. But with 912 additions, I don't really have the time or expertise to go through them and identify any particular one as being a potential culprit. It's been years since I did any kernel work, back in the 2.6 days.

But I'm currently running Slackware 14.1 with the 4.6.5 kernel, and it's running a smooth as can be. Slackware 14.2 with the same kernel and same nVidia driver verison has the pauses that after a while become quite annoying. So really, I'm no closer at finding the cause, let alone a solution. I'm pretty sure it isn't the kernel or video driver. Since I can duplicate it in the console without an X server running, I suspect it's not related to the X server or xfce, which narrows it down quite a bit, but still doesn't give me a clue as to where to look next.

If it's not the kernel and not gui related, where else would you look?