Gnome Shell freezes randomly

[Elmar Pruesse]

(on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, all packages up do date)

For about 5 days now, I've been experiencing random freezes of the X session.

When this happens, I can still move the mouse pointer and it does change shape according to what it hovers above. Keystrokes or mouse clicks do not have any effect though.

Alt-Ctrl-F1 just leads me to another visual login session, which I can log into, but the screen remains black.

Pressing the power button does not lead to a controlled shutdown.

I can remotely log into the system via SSH, but could not find anything amiss in Xorg.?.log or syslog or dmesg.

This is on an AMD Ryzen with a Nvidia GTX1070 using the binary drivers. I tried upgrading from 390.77 to 390.87 from the drivers ppa, but that didn't make much of a difference.

Curiously, at some point, I could trigger the freeze with the "eject" key on my keyboard. The overlay would not be completely rendered, only the grey box, but not the symbol. That works now, and my freezes are only a few times a day, not every 20 minutes. But they continue to occur.

I'm not certain where to look for the cause of this, help would be appreciated.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

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[Elmar Pruesse (epruesse2)]

Thank you, bot. If I knew which component caused this, I'd be a lot further...

Since it is display related, Xorg, nvidia-driver, gnome-session, etc come to mind. There are no crashed or segfaulted processes and unusual error messages as far as I can tell, nor are there any processes spinning at high cpu. I just can't interact with the system anymore.

[Elmar Pruesse (epruesse2)]

Possibly related:

"Some times the ubuntu get totally freeze without reason, in this situation I am not able to do anything, I try some button combination but nothing happen, the only thing I am able to so is just to move the mouse cursor, nothing else. I am only able to shut down the pc with the power button."
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2396635

(Thread closed because diffuse reports of freezing from other people blurred the issue)

"So, every once in a while here in the last week (like... several times) the desktop completely freezes up. I can move the mouse around but nothing is clickable and nothing accepts any keyboard input. I can't type anything anywhere. I can't click anything. All I can do is hold down the power button to turn it off and then restart."
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2392336

(Thread only resulted in advice on how to shut down computer / restart X11 without risking data loss)

This bug describes similar issues, asserting initialy to be related to indicator-multiload, but diverging to other ideas later on. Probably two unrelated issues mixed in there:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-multiload/+bug/1767893

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

If the mouse pointer is moving then Xorg is working fine. The rest of the shell being frozen means it is the 'gnome-shell' process that is frozen.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

To really get to the bottom of this we would need to reproduce the freeze in a development environment.

In the meantime, I have one proposed fix that I think will help to avoid some Gnome Shell Xorg session freezes: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/216

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Please:

1. Run: dmesg > dmesg.txt
   and attach the file 'dmesg.txt' here.

2. Run: lspci -k > lspcik.txt
   and attach the file 'lspcik.txt' here.

3. Reproduce a freeze, reboot and then run:
   journalctl -b-1 > prevboot.txt
   and attach the file 'prevboot.txt' here.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for gnome-shell (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Vitaly Larchenkov (vitaly-user)]

Ubuntu 20.04 Gnome Wayland thinkpad t495 amd ryzen
On Sway/i3 i do not have such problems. Or maybe they occurs but whole display server does not stops responding.

May 24 00:33:04 thinkpad-t495 kernel: [29214.069772] GpuWatchdog[194441]: segfault at 0 ip 00005562286711ed sp 00007f836a69d490 error 6 in chrome[556223fc5000+7858000]
May 24 00:33:04 thinkpad-t495 kernel: [29214.069790] Code: 00 79 09 48 8b 7d b0 e8 21 99 6c fe c7 45 b0 aa aa aa aa 0f ae f0 41 8b 84 24 e0 00 00 00 89 45 b0 48 8d 7d b0 e8 13 64 ba fb <c7> 04 25 00 00 00 00 37 13 00 00 48 83 c4 38 5b 41 5c 41 5d 41 5e
May 24 00:33:34 thinkpad-t495 kernel: [29244.490465] GpuWatchdog[273435]: segfault at 0 ip 00005562286711ed sp 00007f836a69d490 error 6 in chrome[556223fc5000+7858000]
May 24 00:33:34 thinkpad-t495 kernel: [29244.490472] Code: 00 79 09 48 8b 7d b0 e8 21 99 6c fe c7 45 b0 aa aa aa aa 0f ae f0 41 8b 84 24 e0 00 00 00 89 45 b0 48 8d 7d b0 e8 13 64 ba fb <c7> 04 25 00 00 00 00 37 13 00 00 48 83 c4 38 5b 41 5c 41 5d 41 5e
May 24 00:34:06 thinkpad-t495 kernel: [29276.639688] GpuWatchdog[275279]: segfault at 0 ip 00005562286711ed sp 00007f836a69d490 error 6 in chrome[556223fc5000+7858000]

[Vitaly Larchenkov (vitaly-user)]

Archive with debug info

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Vitaly,

Please don't reopen other peoples' bugs. You can report your own by running:

  ubuntu-bug gnome-shell