Fedora 12 freezes

[lensman3]

Nouveau is causing my wife's to freeze when Firefox has multiple tabs open. I have updated her bios, from version 4 to 10 (A). I moved the OS from F12 PAE to F12-64 bit and that seemed to fix the freezes. The freezes are occasional and always when Firefox is running.

The Fedora releases are kind of line the old DEC/VMS releases. The odd releases were experimental and the even releases were stable (or visa-versa). F11 is stable and F12 is flaky.

Why should Firefox lock up a machine? Sounds like there is a race condition down in Nouveau that is not being caught. Nouveau runs in kernel space and Firefox in user space. Firefox shouldn't lock out the keyboard and mouse. <CNTL-ALT-BACKSPACE> should a least get down to X11.

[sandijs]

Greetings!

In my case, there were a lot of symptoms everybody is talking about.
Initially I thought it is ATI Radeon driver - as usually.

Surprisingly, disabling wi-fi helped instantly.

Working on FC12 has moments with little delays - mini freezes. It is possible, that during such moments Atheros wi-fi driver crushes the whole system.

P.S. Fedora quality degrades with each release. As programmer I understand the need to push new features quicker for testing because of Windows 7, however, the users are not happy.

This way you will loose it all, RedHat. Please consult some marketing psychologists about this.

Sandijs

[lasthead]

I'm from Russia and not very well speak English but try to be correct =)
I have same problem: random freezes. No visible reasons, no warning or error records in logs. Use open video drivers for ati from git. The problem has appeared not at once I install F12. But i think this problem not in X. I leave my PC work without started X (in /etc/inittab set runlevel 3) and after some time PC also go freeze.
Anybody made any tests to define the reason?

[sandijs]

I was writing about disabling wi-fi.

Well, if you remove nomodeset from kernel arguments line, computer freezes frequently too. It is important to add this parameter in /etc/grub.conf file!

I have ATI Radeon video card - the worst nightmare, if you are using Linux.

Fedora 12 still is not ready for mainstream use. It has alfa quality.

[teapot]

Originally Posted by puntarenas

So it is not limited to Nvidia cards, sad enough. Are you using the proprietary drivers?

No, I'm using drivers provided by Fedora.

There is an upgrade of mesa packets today. It might help.
But unfortunately the dependencies are broken:

libdrm >= 2.4.17-1

and I'v got:

rpm  -qa | grep libdrm

libdrm-devel-2.4.15-8.fc12.i686
libdrm-2.4.15-8.fc12.x86_64
libdrm-2.4.15-8.fc12.i686
libdrm-devel-2.4.15-8.fc12.x86_64

So I either wait or try

yum update mesa-libGL --enablerepo=updates-testing

[sandijs]

Could the sudden "slow down" after heating too much on the laptop, and the Atheros wi-fi driver sending data with greater intensity cause the freezes?

[teapot]

Maybe you should try:

top -b > top.txt

And after the another freeze, if you are lucky you'll find a program that eat your CPU or/and your memory.

[sandijs]

The problem is, that the system becomes totally dead.

No core dumps, no debugging. Not even speaking about gathering other data.

It completely crushes the kernel.

[sandijs]

Looks like there is some fundamental problem with the basic libraries on FC12 - FireFox, Evolution are dumping cores almost every time when they do get closed.

I wonder if this and the wi-fi and graphic drivers sudden crushes are related as well.

[puntarenas]

Fedora 12 32bit, today's updates and Nvidia driver from rpmfusion still freezes after a few minutes (e.g. surfing in Firefox).

Workaroaunds I tried:

• adding "nomodeset" to kernel parameters
  
• adding "noapic" to kernel parameters
  
• adding "AccelMethod" "EXA" to device section of xorg.conf
  
• adding "AccelMethod" "XAA" to device section of xorg.conf

This way my system is completely unusable, but on the other hand it works well with the default Nouveau driver, so Fedora developers are not to blame. Nevertheless it would be good to know if a bugreport exists and if someone already is working on the issue, because lot's of people still depend on proprietary drivers for now.

[sandijs]

Try disabling wi-fi driver, if you work on laptop. I have big problems with Atheros wi-fi on FC12. Your symptoms sounds to me VERY familiar.

Also, the mess should be bigger, because a lot of apps are dying - that means serious shared libraries problems, most probably.

FC11 works OK on that same hardware.

[puntarenas]

It's a desktop PC without WiFi and it works stable and without any problems as soon as I switch to Nouveau, so I am pretty sure the proprietary Nvidia driver causes my problems.

[Bentover]

I have the same issue with 8600GT. Tried a 7600GS and the problems went away. I'm now hoping to put the 8600GT back again if this problem is solved.

puntarenas, when you say "Nvidia driver from rpmfusion" do you mean 190.42 or 190.53? The latter is still in updates-testing...

[puntarenas]

Originally Posted by Bentover

puntarenas, when you say "Nvidia driver from rpmfusion" do you mean 190.42 or 190.53

190.42 in my case.

Thanks for your reply, so for the Nvidia freezes it seems to be G80 and later GPUs.

[Bentover]

Ok, I'm currently testing 190.53 on my 7600GS. Installed these using:
yum install --enablerepo rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia-PAE

When and if these seems to work I will try the 8600GT again, probably tomorrow. I do not have as frequent hangs as others seems to have, maybe because I normally don't use firefox on my htpc mythtv-box. Maybe every twelve hours or so as an average; system is mostly unused except when watching recordings.