HP Pavilion dv6 has freezing issues

English Hardware
1

The laptop is my sisters so most of what I am hearing is second hand, although when I have worked on the laptop I have seen a number of the symptoms.

Her laptop specs:

  • HP Pavilion dv6
  • AMD phenom II N620 Dual-Core Processor 2.80 GHz
  • 4GB RAM
  • ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5400 (windows also shows a 4200, not sure what that means)

SUSE:

  • 11.4 64bit (currently)
  • KDE 4.7
  • OSS radeon driver

It seems the laptop will just freeze up. By that I mean no mouse movement, no keyboard input, I can’t even switch to tty screens. It just hangs. Seems like you have to hard reboot the machine most times that occurs. It also stutters when typing meaning you get letters of the word you were typing repeated like when typing “the” you might get “tttttthhhhhheeeee”.

The mouse track pad also seems to stutter in that the mouse will stick. With an external mouse it is smooth.

In addition she says the screen goes “blank”. That I don’t remember seeing so I can’t say if backlight going off, screen turning off, or what.

I recently put in a second hard drive to install windows 7 (64bit) to see if it had the same issues. When install the ATI video drivers the backlight turned off for a very long period of time were you could barely see the screen…it did come back on, but it was something like 10 minutes (was googling about the issues on different computer). The mouse track pad seems to work better on windows.

I have reinstalled her laptop numerious times (even through 11.2, 11.3, and 11.4). Seems the same issues persist.

I have a customized HP Pavilion dv9000 which I run suse 11.4 (and for years so older releases) and never had trouble with it. I would say it does (lifetime total of maybe 5 times) freeze up, but nothing you can’t live with. I don’t have the track pad issues etc.

Google seemed to show that people have had some of these issues on windows 7 as well, but I am not sure how reliable that is.

I can’t ever get to tty 10 to see log when it freezes, suppose I can check dmesg, but looking for a) suggestions on where to look in logs, b) debug modes to turn on, c) different distro (driver set)? kernel? what? Any insight will be appreciated.

2

There are a number of hardware faults (eg RAM) that could cause this type of behaviour, but if I understand you correctly, Windows does not have the same issue. When I google for possible leads concerning this model of laptop, I get a lot of overheating results reported:

Pavilion dv6 Overheating. - HP Support Forum
Over Heating Problem in HP Pavilion dv6 1211AX Notebook - General-Laptops-Notebooks - Laptops-Notebooks
Pavilion dv6 overheats, freezes and shuts down the laptop af… - HP Support Forum

I bet if you start up at runlevel 3, it will probably be ok, then start the graphical desktop say 10 mins later, you’ll see it crash at some time ie related to increased CPU and/or GPU activity.

3

A similar openSUSE thread:

HP Pavillion DV6 AMD CPU Heat issue

Installing the proprietary fglrx driver may be helpful here.

4

Thanks for the replies.

I went ahead and installed fglrx driver. Seems to run a bit cooler. And mouse track pad seemed smoother then usual. I started typing quickly and what not and soon it frooze up and had screen artifacts. It unfrooze after a few seconds, but the artifacts remained (even on tty screens).

I pulled the following from dmesg.

515.637302] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 2 bytes away.
516.157870] psmouse.c: resync failed, issuing reconnect request
517.945735] Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 7.4, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd04771/0xe40000/0x5a0400
517.945744] synaptics: support LED control
517.945860] Registered led device: psmouse::synaptics
518.029325] input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input15
624.084849] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost synchronization, throwing 4 bytes away.
624.604928] psmouse.c: resync failed, issuing reconnect request
634.706244] i8042.c: Can’t write CTR while closing AUX port.
635.538245] i8042.c: Can’t reactivate AUX port.
637.891613] i8042.c: Can’t write CTR while closing AUX port.
638.708445] i8042.c: Can’t reactivate AUX port.
639.517775] ACPI Exception: AE_TIME, Returned by Handler for [EmbeddedControl] (20101013/evregion-474)
639.517805] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed _SB_.BAT0._STA] (Node ffff88011b5571f0), AE_TIME (20101013/psparse-537)
639.517841] ACPI Exception: AE_ERROR, Evaluating _STA (20101013/battery-394)
640.322021] i8042.c: Can’t write CTR while closing AUX port.
641.118825] i8042.c: Can’t reactivate AUX port.
647.850305] X:1877 conflicting memory types e0000000-e0300000 uncached-minus<->write-combining
647.850308] reserve_memtype failed 0xe0000000-0xe0300000, track write-combining, req write-combining
647.850311] [fglrx:KCL_MEM_VM_MapRegion] ERROR remap_pfn_range failed
647.850319] [fglrx:__create_mapping] ERROR Can not get virtual address
647.850321] [fglrx:__mc_heap_map_virtual_space] ERROR Failed to map the virtual space
647.850323] [fglrx:mc_heap_map_virtual_space] ERROR Can not get virtual address
647.850324] [fglrx:MCIL_GetVirtualAddressInDescriptor] ERROR Can not get the virtual address
699.290243] X:1877 conflicting memory types e0000000-e0300000 uncached-minus<->write-combining
699.290246] reserve_memtype failed 0xe0000000-0xe0300000, track write-combining, req write-combining
699.290249] [fglrx:KCL_MEM_VM_MapRegion] ERROR remap_pfn_range failed
699.290256] [fglrx:__create_mapping] ERROR Can not get virtual address
699.290258] [fglrx:__mc_heap_map_virtual_space] ERROR Failed to map the virtual space
699.290260] [fglrx:mc_heap_map_virtual_space] ERROR Can not get virtual address
699.290261] [fglrx:MCIL_GetVirtualAddressInDescriptor] ERROR Can not get the virtual address

Curious if a newer kernel might help…and/or wait for 12.1 in a couple weeks.

5

It seems like it doesn’t freeze up (or hasn’t so far) since the touchpad had it’s issue…and as dmesg seems to indicate the trackpad is no longer active. I wondering if disabling the trackpad would help solve the freezing problem. Went to see if I could disable in KDE and found out that the configuration module indicated that no touchpad was found on the system…further supporting the fact that it was no longer active.

More fun stuff from dmesg:

1193.911822] X:1877 conflicting memory types e0000000-e0300000 uncached-minus<->write-combining
1193.911826] reserve_memtype failed 0xe0000000-0xe0300000, track write-combining, req write-combining
1193.911828] [fglrx:KCL_MEM_VM_MapRegion] ERROR remap_pfn_range failed
1193.911836] [fglrx:__create_mapping] ERROR Can not get virtual address
1193.911838] [fglrx:__mc_heap_map_virtual_space] ERROR Failed to map the virtual space
1193.911840] [fglrx:mc_heap_map_virtual_space] ERROR Can not get virtual address
1193.911841] [fglrx:MCIL_GetVirtualAddressInDescriptor] ERROR Can not get the virtual address
1405.678415] show_signal_msg: 45 callbacks suppressed
1405.678419] kmozillahelper[9036]: segfault at 60c530 ip 000000000060c530 sp 00007ffffe5df528 error 15 in kmozillahelper[60c000+1000]
1491.548819] <30>udevd[9866]: starting version 173
1513.693316] loop: module loaded

6

Did you monitor the temperature? If the laptop is a bit old - like more than one or two years, there might be a lot o dust accumulated near the fan, increasing the temperature not only of the CPU but of the chipset and power regulator (the thermal sink covers all three).

7

The temperature seemed to average 20 degrees Fahrenheit lower with the fglrx driver and it seems to work much better overall. I checked the fan and it seems quite clean.

Thanks all for the help, not sure how things will fare in the long-term, but this is definitely a huge step forward. You made my sister extremely happy.

8

Thanks for the update. It may be helpful to others too :slight_smile:

9

It might be the problem with your Windows not the fault in any hardware of your hp pavilion.