X can stop responding when clicking the shutdown button

[Nick2000]

Binary package hint: xorg

The system is using UBUNTU 7.1 64 2.6.2214-generic on a Core 2 Duo platform with 4GB RAM and 965 video card.
I am running several VMplayer sessions as well as firefox and a couple of file managers.

This issue started about 1 month ago and happened twice so far.

Occasionally (about once every 2 weeks), when I click on the red "power" button to lock the screen, it does NOT display the shutdown/restart/lockup splash screen but instead goes into a non-responsive state. In this state, I can not interact with the X server as it ignores all of my clicks and keystrokes.
However I can move the mouse and it will change cursor based on what it flies over. I can hit numlock and the keyboard will reflect that. I can also use Ctrl-Alt-F1 to go to a different console.

So obviously the mouse and keybards are still working but X is just ignoring them (besides mouse movement).

I tried connecting to my desktop using VNC but VNC has the same symptoms.

The applications are still updating the screen (the clock on the menu bar and on the task bar in VMware'd Windows is still on time).

I killed the windowed applications one by one from TTY1 (firefox, vmware window #1, vmware window #2, vmware window #3) and when I killed the last remaining Vmplayer (2.0.2 build-59824) window, X restarted on TTY9.

The same exact thing happened last time: it seems that a VMplayer window is causing this somehow.
Note that the keyboard and mouse were not captured by the vmware window at all. The mouse was moving freely across the desktop and Ctrl-Alt-F1 was working. However, it is possible that VMplayer had the focus when the lock-up happened. Indeed, it's title bar was highlighted.

On a side note I would need to find a way to gracefully stop vmplayer when that happens because I always lose my work...

[Nick2000 (monpetitbeurre)]

It happened again and this time X restarted after I killed a Nautilus session. In short, it was not VMplayer holding inputs hostage.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

From the Xorg.0.log.old:

(II) intel(0): [drm] removed 1 reserved context for kernel
(II) intel(0): [drm] unmapping 8192 bytes of SAREA 0x2efff000 at 0x2b7a98298000
(EE) intel(0): I830 Vblank Pipe Setup Failed 0
(EE) intel(0): I830 Vblank Pipe Setup Failed 0
(EE) intel(0): I830 Vblank Pipe Setup Failed 0
(II) intel(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 0
(II) intel(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 1
(II) intel(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 2
(II) intel(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 3
(II) intel(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 4

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

When it happened the second time, did you have vmplayer running at all during that session? (Perhaps it had been closed, but did not release the inputs correctly or something?)

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Another thing to try is to set this in your xorg.conf:

  Section "Device"
    ...
    Option "ForceEnablePipeA" "true"
  EndSection

If that makes it work, then please paste in the output of `lspci -vvnn | grep -A1 "VGA compat"`, and give the laptop model name and number