Kernel freezing on both ext3 and ext4, possible criminal is Firefox

[Dave Stroud]

While working on Jaunty, I came across freezes, this was moste time when firefox was running, but we thing its in xorg.

[David Stansby (dstansby-deactivatedaccount)]

Please can you have a look here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs?action=show&redirect=DebuggingFirefox and see if any of that helps. If not, please post the outputs to the commands listed there.

[Ryan Waldroop (ryan.waldroop)]

I'm having the same problems, but not necessarily when I'm running firefox. My computer has recently been freezing up when doing an rsync to get my data off of my desktop, and also while apt-get upgrading and apt-get installing things.

I don't think it's my hardware...everything was working fine during Intrepid (running Jaunty now). I'm going to run smartmontools and memtest later.

Could this be an ext4 bug? Seems to happen during heavy HDD usage...

[Dave Stroud (bigdavesr)]

Last kernal update seems to have fixed this for me. Will watch.

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

I have the same problem, and running to ext4, but its not alway heavy cpu loads just out of no where system freezes, I wanna test if this is related to ext4 by making a new jaunty install on different hd

[billy shears (billy-shears)]

I've installed jaunty beta on ext4 yesterday and i've had already two freezes, the first time it happened during very heavy disk activity. I've used another jaunty install for two months until yesterday on ext3 without problems.

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

What I can say about these freezes they happen spontaneous, and when I used jaunty ext3 the same happend, only not that fast, but it still happend, we need to collect info, people maby theres information in our system.logs?

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

Apr 4 01:05:05 Dexter syslogd 1.5.0#5ubuntu3: restart.
Apr 4 01:05:05 Dexter anacron[2625]: Job `cron.daily' terminated
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.092085] usb 1-7: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.229646] usb 1-7: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.276185] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.277351] scsi4 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.283295] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.283313] USB Mass Storage support registered.
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.283968] usb-storage: device found at 3
Apr 4 01:08:13 Dexter kernel: [ 543.283977] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.280304] usb-storage: device scan complete
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.280886] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access Maxtor OneTouch 0125 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.284113] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte hardware sectors: (120 GB/111 GiB)
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.285156] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.285168] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 2d 08 00 00
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.285175] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.287370] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 234441648 512-byte hardware sectors: (120 GB/111 GiB)
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.288107] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.288117] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 2d 08 00 00
Apr 4 01:08:18 Dexter kernel: [ 548.288125] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
Apr 4 01:08:19 Dexter kernel: [ 548.288142] sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3
Apr 4 01:08:19 Dexter kernel: [ 548.649342] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
Apr 4 01:08:19 Dexter kernel: [ 548.649639] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
Apr 4 01:08:33 Dexter ntfs-3g[3639]: Version 2009.2.1 external FUSE 27
Apr 4 01:08:33 Dexter ntfs-3g[3639]: Mounted /dev/sdb2 (Read-Write, label "", NTFS 3.1)
Apr 4 01:08:33 Dexter ntfs-3g[3639]: Cmdline options: rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,locale=nl_NL.UTF-8,locale=nl_NL.UTF-8
Apr 4 01:08:33 Dexter ntfs-3g[3639]: Mount options: rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,silent,allow_other,nonempty,relatime,fsname=/dev/sdb2,blkdev,blksize=4096
Apr 4 01:08:33 Dexter hald: mounted /dev/sdb2 on behalf of uid 1000
Apr 4 01:09:00 Dexter ntfs-3g[3649]: Version 2009.2.1 external FUSE 27
Apr 4 01:09:00 Dexter ntfs-3g[3649]: Mounted /dev/sdb1 (Read-Write, label "", NTFS 3.1)
Apr 4 01:09:00 Dexter ntfs-3g[3649]: Cmdline options: rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,locale=nl_NL.UTF-8,locale=nl_NL.UTF-8
Apr 4 01:09:00 Dexter ntfs-3g[3649]: Mount options: rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,silent,allow_other,nonempty,relatime,fsname=/dev/sdb1,blkdev,blksize=4096
Apr 4 01:09:00 Dexter hald: mounted /dev/sdb1 on behalf of uid 1000
Apr 4 01:09:19 Dexter hald: mounted /dev/sdb3 on behalf of uid 1000
Apr 4 01:09:...

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

Confirmed by me, but if this really only happens when Firefox runs I dont think so.

[billy shears (billy-shears)]

After the third crash I've tried to disable the nvidia (legacy) binary driver and it didn't freeze anymore, quite strange, I've used that driver for two months without problems on the other jaunty install.

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

I dont know if a nvidia driver has to do anything with this, because I have NO nvidia driver and it still happens with my Jaunty install ( If I am correct, having had any freezes since I am home ), but I have a intel atom 330 with a intel vga 945

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

I would like to investigate if Firefox is indeed the cause, because I a not wrong, by every freeze firefox was also running, so I suggest on only using Konqueror for awhile and then we know.

[fixture (universald)]

Same problem here. Thinkpad X61. Computer freezes during high disk activity. Though, it's probably not EXT4, because I had the same problem with a EXT3/Reiserfs setup. In fact, I did a clean ext4 install to test out my original theory of this being a reiserfs problem. Sometimes triggering a freeze only requires saving a document on OpenOffice, Firefox is not required for freeze.

Sometimes you can recover from the freeze by waiting a bit and gently tap the power button, which can bring up the Gnome shutdown panel. Even after recovery, computer quickly becomes unusable and loaded with some kind of processing. If you check powertop, you would find the processor mysteriously at C0 80 or 90% of the time with no program attributable to the activity.

No weird messages or oops in kernel log.

Compiled 2.26.29.1, same problem.

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

Problem hasnt come up anymore here since I compiled the kde-trunk, but theres no saying that, the problem was in the kde packages,

But it isnt firefox who caused it, anyway I dont have any problems anymore, but I have compiled great part off the desktop myself now.

[fixture (universald)]

I installed ssh-server to get to the bottom of this. When the computer froze, I ssh'ed into it. Surprise! It worked.

It turns out that this is not a kernel freeze. Mouse moves but Caps lock does not respond. In the ssh session, I went into top and htop. Nothing suspicious at all, in fact, there's no cpu usage at all! I do even know what to go on.

Then I theorized that this is a graphics hardware problem. I went to test this out by restarting GDM. This little bit of kernel log is what you get:

[ 723.628131] [drm:i915_gem_idle] *ERROR* hardware wedged
[ 723.640543] [drm:i915_get_vblank_counter] *ERROR* trying to get vblank count for disabled pipe 0
[ 791.378469] [drm:i915_gem_entervt_ioctl] *ERROR* Reenabling wedged hardware, good luck
[ 835.163015] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
[ 835.163023] ata1: EH complete
[ 835.163166] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors: (320 GB/298 GiB)
[ 835.163204] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 835.163210] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 835.163265] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

I also attached the bigger kernel log to the message.

[fixture (universald)]

Check this. I have to say, with this bug, Jaunty is not fit for release. I don't know how ubuntu managed to make the release progressively less stable. This thing worked better in Feb!

also, Xubuntu test, same freeze. Problem is in the Xorg infrastructure and not Gnome/Xfce stacks.

http://www.nabble.com/X-freezes-with--intel-driver-on-Jaunty-td22996863.html

[fixture (universald)]

[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/X(xorg_backtrace+0x26) [0x4f1b66]
1: /usr/bin/X(mieqEnqueue+0x359) [0x4d28a9]
2: /usr/bin/X(xf86PostKeyboardEvent+0x96) [0x495fa6]
3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//evdev_drv.so [0x7fabb1b4dc35]
4: /usr/bin/X [0x485be5]
5: /usr/bin/X [0x476f77]
6: /lib/libpthread.so.0 [0x7fabc6ce8080]
7: /lib/libc.so.6(ioctl+0x7) [0x7fabc50f9cd7]
8: /usr/lib/libdrm_intel.so.1(drm_intel_gem_bo_start_gtt_access+0x4d) [0x7fabc30673bd]
9: /usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so(intelFinish+0x41) [0x7fabb2458241]
10: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so [0x7fabc3d66805]
11: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so [0x7fabc3d659d2]
12: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so [0x7fabc3d69de2]
13: /usr/bin/X(Dispatch+0x364) [0x44e304]
14: /usr/bin/X(main+0x3bd) [0x433d8d]
15: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6) [0x7fabc503a5a6]
16: /usr/bin/X [0x433219]
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinit...

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

Hello,

Mark Shuttleworth, congratz at releasing a unstable (K)ubuntu 9.04, with 5 freezes this isnt stable at all, this bug needs serious attention, the guys above me have found usefull information, but still no one pays attention to this bug report, ive tested it on various possible things, first I testes it by installing Jaunty with ext3 and the same happend.

After that I tested to see if Firefox was the one causing it, It seemed it was firefox, but that it wasnt firefox, because later I didnt run firefox, only Konqueror and still it freezed, after that I compiled kde from trunk, I had freezes when doing so, so I had to install Gnome, because my kde was broken, and build folders messed up.

So I see this as a serious problem and it should get high importance, because Ubuntu 9.04 is not stable when bug like these are still around, oh its clear this bug in in xorg.

Guys what for Video cards do you have? I have intel gma 945 on a Intel Atom 330, I going pin point this bug to xorg.

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

Tha will shake them awake maby?

[Dave Stroud (bigdavesr)]

Since I last posted I have had no more problems. Am runing 9.04 ext3 and ext4. I am on an older desktop and dont use nvida .I only use gnome , This has been the most stable test release that I have used.thanks again

[Wesley Velroij (velroy1)]

Say it not to fast, I though it to, and today i had freezes.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

First of all, don't assign bugs to Mark, that's just rude.

Second, the original bug report is about ext4, not X. It should not be assigned to xorg.

Third, velroy and fixture, you guys are clearly experiencing a bug that has nothing to do with the original reporter's. As he has stated twice, his problem is solved. You can either file new bugs, or, if you read the release notes you will see that people are already hard at work on the freeze bugs, and with a little research you can discover the current status, steps to debug, and known workarounds. I leave this as an exercise to you.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Wesley Velroij wrote:
> Tha will shake them awake maby?
>

Wesley, please do not do that. There is plenty of Canonical and
community attention on this bug. Acting like your bug is the most
important thing for me to be doing makes me want to filter all mail from
you straight to trash, and I expect most people will have the same
reaction - so it's not a useful way to work in this community.

Mark

[rodrigo (rodrigo-natalizi)]

In my case, Jaunty ALWAYS freezes when I copy large amount of data (>= 500 MB) TO a hard disk ntfs partition, and I've been trying to do this for the last two days, dozens of time. But when copying to my 8 GB usb flash drive (also ntfs), it works fine, as when copying FROM a ntfs partition.

[Jamie (solowinter)]

I've had 6-7 freezes since upgrading from Ext3 to Ext4 about 24 hours ago. Prior to Ext4, I probably haven't had that many freezes in the past year or more. Freezes have taken place:

1. While watching a video with VLC.
2. While trying to open a torrent file with Ktorrent by clicking a link in Firefox.
3. By opening Ktorrent (but most of the time Ktorrent works fine with the exception of #2, which always results in a system freeze).
4. Sometime during the night in the middle of a large (350+ MB) file transfer.

Just before the last crash, I started transferring a 180 MB file to a thumbdrive. After the crash, the file was still in its original location but the thumbdrive is short about 80 MB with no sign of the file. It's like there's some phantom data taking up space that I can't see.

[Jamie (solowinter)]

Correction on my last comment: the file I was transferring has been lost -- that's 180 MB of data loss due to this bug. The file was too new to even be backed up, so backups wouldn't have saved me.

Does anyone know if this is a bug is limited to the Ubuntu family or is it Ext4 on all distros? I haven't had data loss like this with Ubuntu since Edgy and even then it was probably due to me naively allowing Windows to access an Ext3 partition. So this is my first real experience with an Ubuntu bug killing my data.

[Carlos M (morenoce)]

I also ran into the same issue. I was running Jaunty 64bit with ext4. I was copying a 4GB from an ntfs partition to my thumbdrive. After a few minutes the xfer rate slowed to the point where it just hanged. After I canceled the copying, I reformatted to ext3 and re-install jaunty (luckily it was a fresh install). I didn't have the problem again.

[Ryan Waldroop (ryan.waldroop)]

I'm almost certain this is an ext4 issue. Recently, I was deleting my user
account with about 50GB of music and videos before giving my laptop to my
dad. My laptop completely froze while deleting everything probably 10
times. This happened whether I was deleting from a TTY or with Nautilus. I
eventually started to remove just 1 album at a time.

I've also had a few more freeze ups when evolution was copying an old backup
or if it was downloading my entire gmail account (about 1 gig) via imap.

I have yet to definitively link these freeze ups to firefox.

[naveen (naveenalimzhan)]

I have a Dell Inspiron Mini 10, Atom Z530, 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive, etc.

Whenever I do large transfers from an external hard drive and sometimes--but not as often--whenever I download and install programs from Synaptic, my laptop freezes. It has probably froze more than 10 ten times. When it freezes, I could still move my touchpad pointer but can not open or close anything with it. Keyboard is absolutely useless during those times. However, whenever I am doing large file transfers, I noticed that although I can not access anything during the freeze, the transfer continues to run until the transfer is over.

[neoxjr (lyndon-horsford)]

I've been having the same problem as well for quite some time. I've tried ext3 and ext4. Both seem to have the same random freeze. I'm currently using the 64bit version, but I have a 32bit system at work that doesn't freeze at all. I also notice that my system only freezes after I've logged in. I left the system at the login screen overnight and found that it was still working. Once logged in however, a freeze would happen with no one trigger I could put my finger on.
This led me to believe that some hardware might be the problem. My specs are as follows: AMD 64X2 4200 (939), 3GB RAM, SATA 320GB ext4 disk for jaunty, SATA 400GB ntfs disk for storage, multi card reader, SATA DVDRW.
First thing I did was to take off my card reader (notice when I had cairo-dock running it would show my card reader disk being mounted and unmounted). Freezing continued even after removing nvidia drivers.
Finally disconnected my ntfs drive and eureka, no more freezing. This is my third week since disconnecting the drive and I've enjoyed every bit of Jaunty since. Not sure why Jaunty had a problem with a perfectly good drive formatted with ntfs though. Anyone have any ideas?

[neoxjr (lyndon-horsford)]

forgot to mention, I reinstalled nvidia drivers and even updated firefox 3.5 and still no freezing. I'm also still using the 2.6.28-13 kernel and leaving my computer on for days with no problems at all