Comment 0 for bug 901793

Revision history for this message
John Neffenger (jgneff) wrote :

The X.Org X server on my Dell Precision 490 Workstation freezes consistently and permanently each time I load the Web page at the following address on my Ubuntu 11.10 "oneiric" system running Unity 2D:

  http://www.google.ca/nexus

I never encountered such freezes in the previous release of Ubuntu (11.04 "natty"). The freeze happens with both Mozilla Firefox 8.0 and Chromium 15.0.874.106 (Developer Build 107270 Linux). No updates to the screen occur (no clock updates, for example), but I can SSH into the system to gather information and reboot. There is usually no CPU activity, but one out of the four freezes yesterday had X using over 50 percent CPU usage during the freeze.

I followed the instructions here:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/Freeze

to capture the dmesg output and Xorg.0.log file for each of the four freezes yesterday. Below are the answers to the questions recommended on that page.

Q: When did you upgrade to this version of Ubuntu? When did you first notice the freezes occurring?

A: I upgraded about 3 weeks ago and first noticed the freezes about 2 weeks ago while using the Web browser.

Q: How frequently do the freezes occur? How many per day would you say you experience?

A: They occur about once per week, but yesterday I found a Web site (www.google.ca/nexus) that can cause the freeze each and every time it loads in a Web browser (Firefox and Chromium).

Q: List the applications you typically have open at the time of the freeze.

A: I usually have open at least the Web browser (Firefox or Chromium) and the Terminal. I may also have open GnuCash, a VirtualBox guest running Windows, NetBeans, and Thunderbird.

Q: Think back to the last few times it froze. What activities were you doing in each of those times?

A: The last four times it froze, I simply clicked a link to go to the site www.google.ca/nexus or loaded it directly from the address bar.

Q: Do you have compiz enabled? Does the issue go away if you disable it?

A: I am running Unity 2D, the Unity interface for non-accelerated graphics cards. I see compositing effects, so perhaps I'm running compiz. I'll look into disabling it.

Q: If your system is a laptop, do you suspend/resume it? Had you resumed at some point prior to the freezes?

A: My system is a Dell Precision 490 Workstation. I suspend it at night, but this freeze occurs even right after a fresh reboot after visiting the Google Nexus page.

Additional information:

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 11.10
Release: 11.10

$ apt-cache policy xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau:
  Installed: 1:0.0.16+git20110411+8378443-1
  Candidate: 1:0.0.16+git20110411+8378443-1
  Version table:
 *** 1:0.0.16+git20110411+8378443-1 0
        500 http://ca.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status