Hi,
For a few months now, I've been experiencing random xfs (the font server, not the filesystem ;-)) crashes on my laptop running FC Dev. As it was a system installed with FC back in January, which had run a binary distribution of XFree86 4.4RC (because the Radeon Mobility 9600 is not supported by 4.3), then upgraded to FC2, FC Dev and had plenty of custom fonts here and there, I didn't bother much to look for the problem.
But I reinstalled FC3RC5 cleanly (complete format) Monday, and saw xfs crash on the same day, even before having installed a single 3rd party package or font!
The symptoms are quite nasty : If it happens when xscreensaver is running and locks the display, then the login dialog simply never shows up and it gives the impression that the computer is frozen, since even Alt+Ctrl+F1 takes a long time before actually switching to the console! If it's during "normal" operation, then firefox often disappears, focus between windows doesn't work anymore (actually, it almost does, but keyboard/mouse input stops working sometimes, it can come back after "Alt+Tab"... weird), and new applications _all_ fail to start. Seth, could this be what you're seeing? Computer is still reachable by the network, though, so probably not.
Even restarting xfs doesn't cure the running X... X needs to be completely restarted before things start working normally again.
Right now, I'm running with "ulimit -c unlimited; xfs -nodaemon" on my first console... but xfs still hasn't crashed again, so I'm still waiting before I can expect being able to make a useful bug report. Still, I was wondering, does anyone else suffer from the symptoms above? I found zarroo bugs about xfs crashing in FC, so I'm a bit puzzled. If you think you have this problem, just "service xfs status" and you'll know for sure.
Matthias
Matthias Saou wrote:
Still, I was wondering, does anyone else suffer from the symptoms above?
I had several xfs crashes with FC2, always when the machine was under heavy load and/or swapping a lot (most of the time rpmbuilding a C++ app). And xfs wasn't killed by the kernel to free memory, I checked /var/log/messages. I can't say it is reproductable either, but at least it happened to me too.
Aurélien
Aurelien Bompard wrote :
Matthias Saou wrote:
Still, I was wondering, does anyone else suffer from the symptoms above?
I had several xfs crashes with FC2, always when the machine was under heavy load and/or swapping a lot (most of the time rpmbuilding a C++ app). And xfs wasn't killed by the kernel to free memory, I checked /var/log/messages. I can't say it is reproductable either, but at least it happened to me too.
I've got a little more on the problem : It seems that xfs exits cleanly after receiving a SIG-something. I had that happen while I was strace'ing in in tty1, but forgot to send the output to a file. I'll open a bug report as soon as it happens again, as I'm pipe tee'ing it now ;-)
Matthias
Hi.
Matthias Saou thias@spam.spam.spam.spam.spam.spam.spam.egg.and.spam.freshrpms.net wrote:
I've got a little more on the problem : It seems that xfs exits cleanly after receiving a SIG-something. I had that happen while I was strace'ing in in tty1, but forgot to send the output to a file. I'll open a bug report as soon as it happens again, as I'm pipe tee'ing it now ;-)
Why don't you just run it under gdb with -debuginfo installed?
On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 16:47, Matthias Saou wrote:
Hi,
For a few months now, I've been experiencing random xfs (the font server, not the filesystem ;-)) crashes on my laptop running FC Dev. As it was a system installed with FC back in January, which had run a binary distribution of XFree86 4.4RC (because the Radeon Mobility 9600 is not supported by 4.3), then upgraded to FC2, FC Dev and had plenty of custom fonts here and there, I didn't bother much to look for the problem.
Me too. I've had this under FC2 ever since it came out. But I could never figure out a good way of reproducing it.
For me, additional symptoms where that some gtk1 apps (take, say, xmms or vncviewer) suddenly were using a font like courier. At other times, I had the same problem as you - the whole machine locking up, and only logging in remotely and restarting xfs would help.
It's quite maddening, since I never found a trigger for it allowing me to reproduce it. But you're not seeing ghosts.
Thomas
Thomas Vander Stichele wrote :
For a few months now, I've been experiencing random xfs (the font server, not the filesystem ;-)) crashes on my laptop running FC Dev. As it was a system installed with FC back in January, which had run a binary distribution of XFree86 4.4RC (because the Radeon Mobility 9600 is not supported by 4.3), then upgraded to FC2, FC Dev and had plenty of custom fonts here and there, I didn't bother much to look for the problem.
Me too. I've had this under FC2 ever since it came out. But I could never figure out a good way of reproducing it.
For me, additional symptoms where that some gtk1 apps (take, say, xmms or vncviewer) suddenly were using a font like courier. At other times, I had the same problem as you - the whole machine locking up, and only logging in remotely and restarting xfs would help.
It's quite maddening, since I never found a trigger for it allowing me to reproduce it. But you're not seeing ghosts.
I've opened a bug report about this : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=141140
Speaking with some other Fedora Core users here in the office, I realized that _all_ of them had seen these symptoms at least once, but as they don't have the sufficient knowledge to troubleshoot the problem, their solution at the time was to restart their computer...
Matthias
-
Aurelien Bompard -
Matthias Saou -
Ralf Ertzinger -
Thomas Vander Stichele