Gnome Shell periodically locks up hard in F16

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On 11/19/2011 12:33 AM, Deron Meranda wrote:
> Since upgrading to Fedora 16, I have experienced several periodic hard
> lock-ups of the Gnome Shell session. I never experienced such
> behaviour in F15. I am wondering if anybody else is seeing something
> similar or may have advice, or can suggest a better way for me to
> gather useful debugging information should it happen again.

..

> 
> Otherwise, I don't have much else to report at this point. Any help to
> figure this out would be appreciated. Thanks.

 The symptoms you describe are strongly suggestive of a bug with the
gnome window manager itself (shell?) which very likely has crashed - the
mouse events continue to be handled by X itself but consumption by the
window manager not being available.

 I wonder if its possible to ssh in to your semi-frozen computer and
point gdb at the appropriate process?

 If you can indeed ssh in then it would be interesting to run top and
see if there is a process stuck in a loop or if (as seems most likely)
the window manager itself has crashed and died - in which case
restarting it may well revive the desktop.

  In the latter case - please attach gdb to the process (from your
remote ssh login) and leave it running until the next crash - then get a
backtrace - that should be helpful to the gnome-shell devs.

  gene

[PS please don't cross post to fedora-list at redhat - its a dead list]