Hi, my sister told me her nice Thinkpad R61i (Intel GM965/GL960 graphics, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG) had several problems since I installed opensuse11 a few months ago. Most are minor issues, some function keys are not working, wireless networking does not perform very well and so on. The issue I want to address here is that the system tends to freeze on an hourly basis (or so). She merely uses standard applications like OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Kopete and Skype and has dealt exceedingly patient with that problem even though she needs her laptop for university.
Long story short: We swapped laptops and I was at least able to reproduce the symptoms of her disease but with a program she never uses: googleearth. The only thing I have to do to crash the system, both in KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1, is to open e.g. the “global thinking” menu in ge and change the width of the left panel shortly after. Then the screen shows black for less than a second and the desktop shows up again but is not responding at all. Ctrl+Alt+(2x)Backspace does not work, Ctrl+Alt+F2 neither. I can’t even access the machine via ssh. Only by pressing the power button for a few seconds or using magic Alt+SysRQ stuff I can shutdown or reboot the system which works properly after the X server terminates.
/var/log/messages:
kdm[2611]: X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly
Broadcast message from root (Mon Oct 13 06:13:13 2008):
The system is going down for system halt NOW!
As it seems to have something to do with X I had a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old and it stated:
(WW) intel(0): ESR is 0x00000001
(WW) intel(0): PRB0_CTL (0x0001f001) indicates ring buffer enabled
(WW) intel(0): PRB0_HEAD (0x0361a4b8) and PRB0_TAIL (0x0001d9d8) indicate ring buffer not flushed
(WW) intel(0): Existing errors found in hardware state.
Well, I think Xorg.log wanted to tell me that I won’t be able to solve this problem. So I googled and after reading a couple of posts on several distributions I came to the conclusion that it might be a good idea to install a new xorg-x11-driver-video package from the X11 repo. After doing that I was unable to start an X-server at all. So I finally downgraded and found myself right back at the starting point. Can anyone give me a hint?
Thanks for that link. Obviously it’s not exactly my problem. They are at least able to move their mousecursor but my system freezes entirely. And I never tried to rotate anything. I searched bugs.freedesktop.org and found this bug, which resembles my problem very well: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15541. So maybe, I’ll really have to fiddle about a new X-server.
Meanwhile I found out that opensuse also freezes when an openGL screesaver is running. So I changed my screensaver to blackscreen to have one problem less.
I have the same problem with a Compaq 6710b laptop (Intel GM965 chipset) running OpenSUSE 11.0. The system sometimes completely freezes in OpenGL applications. Tried with both KDE 4.0.4 and 4.1.2, with the same results.
If OpenGL is not used, the system is perfectly stable (not even a stability problem noticed in 2 months of fairly continuous use). But any OpenGL application can freeze it in a few minutes.
The screen turns black for an instant, then the image reappears with the mouse frozen and the system unresponsive to any keys (though occasional hard drive activity may occur).
In this situation, xorg.0.log.old reads on the next restart at the very end:
(WW) intel(0): ESR is 0x00000001
(WW) intel(0): PRB0_CTL (0x0001f001) indicates ring buffer enabled
(WW) intel(0): PRB0_HEAD (0x06a1fff8) and PRB0_TAIL (0x00000048) indicate ring buffer not flushed
(WW) intel(0): Existing errors found in hardware state.
The OpenGL application simply freezes, but the mouse can still be moved on the screen. Just as in case 1, system is unresponsive to any keys and occasional hard drive activity may still occur.
In this case, xorg.0.log.old contains, on the next restart, thousands of the following messages at the end:
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.
tossed event which came in late
The two patterns alternate randomly, with the second being more frequent (at least for the OpenGL applications I’m using).
I’ve also tried updating the kernel to 2.6.27 rc3 (to see whether the latest version of the DRM Intel driver fixes the issue). The symptoms look exactly the same.
The other things to try is to update MESA and 2D intel drivers and see whether it fixes anything (didn’t get to that yet).
Then all OpenGL applications stopped working completely, complaining they could not find the correct visual. After digging around for a while, I noticed an error message from AIGLX in the log complaining about a missing dependency in the Intel DRI driver. So I upgraded to the latest version of Xorg and then everything started working fine. So the DRI driver included in OpenSUSE 11.0 was to blame, and the version shipped with MESA 7.2 is the right one.
So, if anybody experiences the same symptoms, the solution is to update MESA to 7.2 and all Xorg packages to the latest versions (some 4.1.x, some 4.2.x at this time) from the OpenSUSE build service (the link above). As a sidenote, Yast won’t complain that the latest version of MESA requires a later version of Xorg, you need to manually force the update of all packages to the version in the build service.
Stefan, I’m happy you found a solution. Unfortunately it does not work for me. As the problem no longer exists in openSUSE11.1 beta 3 (and Kubuntu 8.10 beta) I’ll wait for the final release.
I’m sorry to hear that. I was hoping what I did would be useful for you too.
It is true that I didn’t uninstall the new 2.6.27-rc3 kernel either (my first try was the kernel upgrade, which by itself didn’t solve it), but maybe that is also needed to produce the results… Hell knows…
Anyway, it’s good to hear that OpenSUSE 11.1 solves the problem for you too.
