[i965gm] Jaunty intermittently freezes on Lenovo X61s related to graphics activity

[Ian Howson]

I'm getting occasional hangs on my X61s (3-4 times/day); the only common thread is that it happens during heavy graphics activity (e.g. flipping between VT's, zooming images in Firefox, browsing through photos).

After the hang, the mouse pointer is nonresponsive and I can't switch out of X with Ctrl-Alt-F1. The disk activity LED does flicker when I hold the power button to force powerdown, though I'm not sure that this indicates the kernel is alive at some level.

xserver-xorg-video-intel version is 2:2.6.3-0ubuntu (Jaunty). Bug wasn't present on Intrepid.

I'm not certain that this is an Intel/X problem, but as mentioned above, graphics activity is the only commonality between the hangs.

Any suggestions for how to narrow this down would be appreciated.

[lspci]
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a00] (rev 0c)
     Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:20b3]
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a02] (rev 0c)
     Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:20b5]

[Ian Howson (ianhowson)]

Xorg log (pre-crash; all of my older post-crash logs look identical, so they're probably not being updated at crash time)

[Ian Howson (ianhowson)]

OK, I've had three crashes in the last hour. The actions I was doing during these were:
- 2x browsing through lightboxed images in Firefox
- closing a tab in Firefox

Usually, the mouse pointer hangs too. During one of these crashes, it stayed alive.

I can log in through SSH. The Xorg process is in uninterruptible sleep.

If I kill -9 the Xorg process, the screen image changes to the attached photo. The process doesn't actually go away (presumably due to the uninterruptible sleep).

One of the crashes caused a kernel oops. The log is attached. Looking through this, a kernel bug seems more plausible; I'll continue to gather evidence and reassign if necessary.

The Xorg log shows no error messages after crashing.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We have a PPA with some new tools for debugging X freezes:

  https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-freeze-test

I know how irritating X freezes can be. They're also typically
quite hard to debug, but the information provided by these new
tools should help upstream figure them out.

You can help by doing the following:

 A. Install the PPA packages on Jaunty and boot kernel 2.6.30-rc2
 B. Reproduce your freeze
 C. ssh into the machine and run the steps to collect the info
 D. Attach the tarball of the results to this bug report

With this information, we'll be able to forward your bug upstream.

(For more information on triaging X freeze bugs, see
 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze )

[Ian Howson (ianhowson)]

Since installing the 2.6.30-rc2 kernel, I've had no more X crashes.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks for letting us know the issue is resolved.

[Ahmad Syukri Abdollah (syockit)]

Ian, I assume you got it from kernel-ppa?

Is the fix going to be backported for Jaunty, which still uses 2.6.28?

[Ian Howson (ianhowson)]

Yep, for 2.6.30 I used the PPA linked above.

Since the last update, I've been running the 2.6.29 kernel linked on 'Jaunty Intel Graphics Performance Guide' (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582). It's a bit faster and does not crash.

A backport for Jaunty would be nice, if only for security updates.