[i945 GMA950] X freezes about once a week

[Steve Alexander]

I'm running jaunty on my Sony Vaio TZ190N.

Three times in the last two weeks I have experienced a total GUI hang. The screen becomes totally frozen, although the mouse will still move. The keyboard does not respond to ctrl+alt+2 (for example) to switch to a console.

There is nothing of note in /var/log/messages or dmesg or .xsession-errors or /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

It is still possible to ssh into the machine while it is in this state. Killing compiz and gnome-related processes does nothing to the state of the screen. Killing X with -9 as root caused the screen to be corrupted, and the computer to entirely freeze. It was no longer pingable after that.

After a hard reset, the computer was usable again.

[lspci]
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub [8086:27a0] (rev 03)
     Subsystem: Sony Corporation Device [104d:900e]
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27a2] (rev 03)
     Subsystem: Sony Corporation Device [104d:900e]

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

When reporting X issues, please attach the output of `lspci -vvnn`, and attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file from after reproducing this issue. If you've made any customizations to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf please attach that as well.

[Steve Alexander (stevea)]

Here's the output of 'lspci -vvnn'. I have no customizations in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

[Carey Underwood (cwillu)]

Steve, are you running any EXT4 filesystems?

[Steve Alexander (stevea)]

I'm not running any EXT4 filesystems.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Steve, you mentioned you saw it 3 times in 2 weeks, does the frequency of 1x/week sound about right? Have you discovered any triggers that make it occur more frequently?

Also I noticed you mentioned you're using compiz. We have a number of reports of freezes that go away after disabling compiz. With such a low frequency it would be hard to verify that fixes it here, but it's something you could consider trying.

[Steve Alexander (stevea)]

Yes, about once a week when I'm regularly using the laptop for regular stuff like email, web browsing, word processing and all that. Not generally for compiling code.

I haven't found anything that obviously triggers the problem.

[Andres Mujica (andres.mujica)]

Steve please add the /var/log/xorg.0.log when it hangs.

Also is possible for you to check:

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

and follow the steps from there.

This is most probably a dupe from bug #359392 as this is one of the pci id's most reported there.

[Andres Mujica (andres.mujica)]

well, at least similar as the dates don't match

[Zack Evans (zevans23)]

Whoa. This isn't an Intel 965, unless I've missed something. If anything it's a dupe of bug 365527, or one of the other bug numbers discussed in THAT bug.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We're closing this bug since it is has been some time with no response from the original reporter. However, if the issue still exists please feel free to reopen with the requested information. Also, if you could, please test against the latest development version of Ubuntu, since this confirms the bug is one we may be able to pass upstream for help.

[Daniel Manley (i-daniel-l)]

I am experiencing this bug as well, though with an Acer laptop, no touch screen. random lockups where the mouse still works. fiddling with tty1 has mixed results -- killall on compiz to avoid a hard reboot would work for a bit, but after a couple of hits of that, things just went weird in the way of it just giving me the stock orange background image, or performing very slowly. I switched from firefox usage to chrome and that seemed to help. the last day I was using firefox, this lockup happened 3 times in one morning. normally after my screen sleeps from inactivity. but sometimes while I'm actively using the laptop. after 5 days of no issues in using chrome, it happened again. I've downloaded the compiz config app and disabled animations. hoping that will avoid the problem.

Acer E1-510-2827
Linux danwork 3.16.0-28-generic #38-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 12 17:37:40 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

H/W path Device Class Description
=================================================
                          system E1-510 (E1-510_0845_V2.05)
/0 bus E1-510
/0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS
/0/4 processor Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N2920 @ 1.86GHz
/0/4/8 memory 32KiB L1 cache
/0/4/9 memory 1MiB L2 cache
/0/7 memory 24KiB L1 cache
/0/f memory 8GiB System Memory
/0/f/0 memory 8GiB SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1066 MHz (0.9 ns)
/0/f/1 memory SODIMM [empty]
/0/100 bridge Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series SoC Transaction Register
/0/100/2 display Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display

[Daniel Manley (i-daniel-l)]

as per instructions from a bug supervisor, I've open bug 1408038 for my own issue.