3rd lockup in 3 days

English Hardware
1

For months I have been enjoying trouble free use of opensuse 12.3 (KDE
4.10) on my laptop. Then in the last 3 days, for no apparent reason, my
screen has suddenly gone blank, forcing me to power off and reboot. In
one case I had a video running in smplayer2, paused, while talking on
skype to someone across the world. Another time, I had just started a
‘zypper refresh’ in a konsole.

When I first started openSUSE 2 years ago on a desktop, I had my system
freeze up several times because of a poorly configured graphics card and
the nouveau driver. This time, I have no idea why this has happened.

The only thing I have done differently is that sometime in the past week
I uninstalled apper and decided to only use zypper patch, like I did in
the past. Besides that, it has been basic use only. My laptop is on for
on average about 2 hours every day.

When this happens again, upon reboot, what logs should I look at to try
and start troubleshooting the source of the problem? I am posting here
in hardware because I am guessing it could have something to do with the
graphics card, but that is only because of my past experience. I don’t
have any solid evidence that the graphics card has caused the problem,
at least in a way that I would understand.

here is my graphics card info:


tribetreklap:/home/george # hwinfo --gfxcard
09: PCI 02.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)
[Created at pci.319]
Unique ID: _Znp.NM4Dfup9NW6
SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
SysFS BusID: 0000:00:02.0
Hardware Class: graphics card
Model: "Intel VGA compatible controller"
Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
Device: pci 0x0126
SubVendor: pci 0x1043 "ASUSTeK Computer Inc."
SubDevice: pci 0x0116
Revision: 0x09
Driver: "i915"
Driver Modules: "drm"
Memory Range: 0xdd000000-0xdd3fffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
Memory Range: 0xc0000000-0xcfffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
I/O Ports: 0xe000-0xe03f (rw)
IRQ: 43 (12158 events)
I/O Ports: 0x3c0-0x3df (rw)
Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d00000126sv00001043sd00000116bc03sc00i00"
Driver Info #0:
Driver Status: i915 is active
Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe i915"
Config Status: cfg=no, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown

Primary display adapter: #9

–
G.O.
Box #1: 12.3 | KDE 4.10 | AMD Phenom IIX4 | 64 | 16GB
Box #2: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | AMD Athlon X3 | 64 | 4GB
Laptop: 12.3 | KDE 4.10 | Core i7-2620M | 64 | 8GB

2

Sorry to say I can’t help with your primary issue here, but I do suggest that
“power of and reboot” should be an absolutely last resort. Much better to first
try <ALT>+<SysRq or Prnt Scrn> + R-E-I-S-U-B.

There’s lots of good info here. Be sure to scroll down to see how to enable the
capability.

3

On 08/21/2013 09:16 PM, caprus wrote:
>
> golson765;2580696 Wrote:
>> my screen has suddenly gone blank, forcing me to power off and reboot…
> Sorry to say I can’t help with your primary issue here, but I do
> suggest that
> “power of and reboot” should be an absolutely last resort. Much better
> to first
> try <ALT>+<SysRq or Prnt Scrn> + R-E-I-S-U-B.
>
> There’s lots of good info here. Be sure to scroll down to see how to
> enable the
> capability.
>
>
Ok, that is good new information. However, how to enable the capability?
Did you mean to add more to your post?

–
G.O.
Box #1: 12.3 | KDE 4.10 | AMD Phenom IIX4 | 64 | 16GB
Box #2: 12.2 | KDE 4.9.2 | AMD Athlon X3 | 64 | 4GB
Laptop: 12.3 | KDE 4.10 | Core i7-2620M | 64 | 8GB

4

Very sorry for the confusion. the word “here” was a link to Linux Kernel Magic SysRq keys in openSUSE for crash recovery | SUSE & openSUSE

I can only suppose that the link got lost in the posting process.

5

If there is constant disk activity when it freezes it could indicate a drive going south. run smartctrl and see if there are serious disk errors

6

I have been having that problem off and on for three years, though it is less common now. It happens with a laptop and Intel graphics.

When the system freezes, it stops all disk activity and all network activity (doesn’t respond to “ping” for example). So I think it is frozen well and good, with probably nothing other than power-off to fix it.

If I boot with “nomodeset”, then there are no freezes, so that pretty much points to the video driver (i915).

In KDE, I have configured power manager to never dim the screen. The freezes only seem to occur with screen brightness changes. Since configuring to never dim the screen, I only have occasional freezes on KDE startup. Once KDE is up and running, it is fine.

Note that switching off the screen when idle does not seem to be a problem. It is only the dimming and restore from dimming that seems to cause a problem.