Complete system freezes

[pd1853]

Hi,

I`m getting very weird system lockups lately - the screen freezes, the cursor doesn`t move, and hotkeys like ctrl-alt-f1 don`t work. They seem to happen at random.

The strangest thing is, there are no errors in /var/log/messages, and while frozen all other messages from firewall etc. stop. However, syslogd drops a line when reset button is pushed.

I first thought about overheating, but there never was a problem before, even when i ran folding@home client 24/7, and i still sometimes play oblivion in wxp for couple of hours without a problem...

I understand, that this information is not sufficent for any kind of diagnosis but probably you can point me out a way to track down this problem

[paul matthijsse]

I see the same behavior since a month or so (freezing), but that is positively related to inserting a dvd in the drive. Donno why... Is there a cd/dvd in your drive that is being (randomly) read for some reason?
Paul.

[sideways]

Have you compiled or installed any 3rd party drivers?

I used to get this behaviour with ndiswrapper and wifi drivers, system would freeze up after an hour or so. (Needed a 16k Stack kernel to fix it)

[pd1853]

Originally Posted by paul matthijsse

Is there a cd/dvd in your drive that is being (randomly) read for some reason?

I don`t quite remember, but I think the last time it crashed there was no cd... I`ll try to keep dvd drive empty to make sure.

Originally Posted by sideways

Have you compiled or installed any 3rd party drivers?

I used to get this behaviour with ndiswrapper and wifi drivers, system would freeze up after an hour or so. (Needed a 16k Stack kernel to fix it)

The only two 3rd party drivers are nvidia and ntfs-3g, but both seem stable enough not to cause such things. Actually at first i thought it was ntfs-3g, because every time it crashed, there was some activity on ntfs mounts, and sometimes it crashed just in the beginning of opening a folder or copying, but the last crash was after a scheduled boot when i just browsed couple of sites and didn`t open anything from ntfs drives.

I`ll try installing 16k kernel just in case though, thanks for advice. I also updated ntfs-3g to the newest 1.0 final (not yet released for fedora), will keep my fingers crossed

ps. I have libg15 and g15daemon running for logitech g11 too, completely forgot about that ) dunno if this constitutes as a 'driver' though

[sideways]

I don't think you need the 16k kernel for ntfs-3g or nvidia drivers, or that it will fix anything in these cases. Try removing ntfs-3g first and see if that improves things, you can install the read only driver instead (yum install kmod-ntfs) then mount using fs type 'ntfs', it may be more stable.

There are daemon processes which may be accessing your nt drives even though you're not aware of it.

[pd1853]

Removing ntfs-3g isn`t a solution for me now ( i need a read-write access and there`s not enough space to convert them to ext3. If nothing else works, it is possible to make them fat32 without fromatting in windows, so i`ll try that.

[sideways]

I thought it would be a good idea to test the ntfs driver first, since it's quick and easy way to rule out that as the cause of the problem.

Don't know about that logitech keyboard.

Reformatting as fat32 is quite an extreme solution, but good luck anyway

[name_user]

I also have the freeze problem. The following are the lines, when crashed from /var/log/messages. Any advices on what happened are appreciated. By the way, I disabled wireless after the system is up.
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: 1342 pages pagetables
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of Memory: Kill process 3415 (run-mozilla.sh) score 50753 and children.
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 3420 (firefox-bin).
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of Memory: Kill process 3120 (nautilus) score 38232 and children.
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 3120 (nautilus).
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of Memory: Kill process 2584 (mysqld) score 34243 and children.
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 2584 (mysqld).
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of Memory: Kill process 3375 (beagled-helper) score 33886 and children.
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 3375 (beagled-helper).
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of Memory: Kill process 3149 (beagled) score 28232 and children.
Feb 22 20:18:03 localhost kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 3149 (beagled).
Feb 22 20:18:04 localhost kernel: bcm43xx: PHY connected
Feb 22 20:18:04 localhost kernel: bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
Feb 22 20:18:04 localhost kernel: bcm43xx: core_up for active 802.11 core failed (-2)
Feb 22 20:18:04 localhost firmware_helper[5699]: Loading of /lib/firmware/bcm43xx_microcode5.fw for bcm43xx driver failed: No such file or directory
Feb 22 20:18:07 localhost NetworkManager: <WARNING> nm_device_802_11_wireless_scan (): could not trigger wireless scan on device eth1: No such device
Feb 22 20:20:31 localhost syslogd 1.4.1: restart.

[KKJensen]

I just installed ndiswrapper 1.25 on FC6 2.6.19-1.2911 and while fooling around with Network Manager and the System Network Config utility, my machine froze up solid too.

I've been reading about the 4k vs 16k kernel stuff. Since I'm still a noob I have hunted down this wee line of code but the 4k warnings went away when I tried ndiswrapper 1.25 on 2.6.19-1.2911 so I wasn't really sure if the 4k stack has already been disabled or what.

Would going to 16k help? Again, having never done this before I'd appreciate any urls or howto's anyone has to offer.

[tasm]

Originally Posted by KKJensen

I've been reading about the 4k vs 16k kernel stuff. Since I'm still a noob I have hunted down this wee line of code but the 4k warnings went away when I tried ndiswrapper 1.25 on 2.6.19-1.2911 so I wasn't really sure if the 4k stack has already been disabled or what.

Same problem here. The error occurs when I change the settings of my wireless access point, I think ndiswrapper is responsible for these errors but I'm not sure about it.
You should give this thread a try: http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=139648