[galway-lug] Ubuntu 12.04 freezes

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Carles Sentis

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May 31, 2012, 11:19:28 AM5/31/12
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Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04 I was having freezes problems, reboots or just plains log-outs for no apparent reason. I amuse at first that it was something when wrong with my upgrade. My initial reactions was to check the Nvidia drivers but no matter which one I try it just doesn't seem to work. At the moment I'm using unity 2d and I didn't have any more problems.

The core problem I think seems to be Unity running with compiz. I thought this was my isolated problem but apparently this has been happening all over the shop. I was wondering if other are having the same problem


r.. carles

Aaron Hastings

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May 31, 2012, 11:22:23 AM5/31/12
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At the top of the original report, the guy says he has updated to Linux 3.3.6 and is not having issues since. He hasn't posted in ten days so that could be a good sign?

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gerryk

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May 31, 2012, 11:26:52 AM5/31/12
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Yeah, I have had a couple of reboots too... no panics, and nothing in /var/log/messsages, just a hard  shutdown.
Ubuntu have had their last install on anything of mine, I think.
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Aaron Hastings

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May 31, 2012, 11:29:13 AM5/31/12
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I've actually had no kernel panics on my Asus N53 with 12.04. Had two with 11.10. Both times with Adobe Flash Player running... interesting...

Carles Sentis

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May 31, 2012, 11:38:33 AM5/31/12
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Solution on #91 is for Intel Ivy Bridge (i5-3570K, etc.) users!  I'm using AMD64bit and if you continue reading the problems this solution only seems to work for those systems. I haven't found a conclusive solutions for AMD yet..

Aaron, first I thought It was adobe as the first few times it only happened playing youtube videos but it got worst and it started to happened in all sorts of situations without flash been used at the time or even a browser. Although I found that heavy sites on scripts and flash like channel 4 where completely unusable as my system will just shut-down in a matter of seconds.

Aaron Hastings

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May 31, 2012, 11:40:51 AM5/31/12
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I suggest you call up Adobe support's Linux department and explain your issue.

...sorry, not helpful :P

Nicola Di Marzo

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May 31, 2012, 12:19:02 PM5/31/12
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Strange...i hadn't any problems since my upgrade to 12.04 on my asus netbook n270.
Have you tried starting with a different kernel at grub's menu? you should have a default 3.2.0-24-generic...

I couldn't live without my debian 6 partition at ubuntu's side :-)
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Gerard Ryan

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May 31, 2012, 12:59:01 PM5/31/12
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>
>

Just a thought, are these problems all caused by upgrades, or do they
happen on clean installs too? I've only really got experience with
Fedora, but upgrading from one release to another often seems to cause
hiccups for people.

Semi-related: Fedora 17 was released this week! :)


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Carles Sentis

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May 31, 2012, 1:02:41 PM5/31/12
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I'll try with a different kernel...

On of my thought was to do a fresh install but after reading the comments on the bug thread some people are having issues with fresh installs also which doesn't sound promesing

Carles Sentis

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May 31, 2012, 1:19:27 PM5/31/12
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at the moment installed and running with kernel 3.3.6 find here --> http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/
if that fails I'll try with 3.3.7 and 3.4. I'll keep you posted as others may have the same issue

Nicola Di Marzo

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May 31, 2012, 1:56:12 PM5/31/12
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upgrading is always risky, especially when you upgrade from a non-LTS to an LTS.
In your case, I think that your particularly proprietary video driver (like you said disabling compiz resolves) could be the cause but i may be wrong...

@Gerard: cheers, fedora 17! I'm using 16 with xfce on my my musical laptop with ubuntu.
If anyone's interested here you can find a very cool guide to turn fedora into a audio-music box
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/16/html/Musicians_Guide/index.html

p.s. also Mint 13 is out now, probably it's better than ubuntu...

Aaron Hastings

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May 31, 2012, 7:27:32 PM5/31/12
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I might finally get around to partitioning my disk with Fedora...

Anyone remember the release of Fedora where the most exciting new feature was how it rendered JPEGs "slightly faster"? It was either 15 or 16...

Aaron
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Carles Sentis

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May 31, 2012, 10:01:06 PM5/31/12
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Even if I disable Nvidia proprietary drivers running unity 3d with compiz I still get freezes.

Running 3.6 or 3.7 doesn't seem to work. I haven't tried 3.4.

The reason I'm writing now is for the surprise that you learn something new everyday. One of the members on comment #142 suggested to reduce the swappiness to 10 and using this he stopped the freezes on his machine. So, I've been using Ubuntu for 5 years now and I don't remember swappines anywhere, at least not in a meaningful way. A quick search in Google brought to this page for swappines --> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq

Now, if you scroll towards the bottom of the page you will find this:

What is swappiness and how do I change it?

The swappiness parameter controls the tendency of the kernel to move processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk. Because disks are much slower than RAM, this can lead to slower response times for system and applications if processes are too aggressively moved out of memory.

  • swappiness can have a value of between 0 and 100
  • swappiness=0 tells the kernel to avoid swapping processes out of physical memory for as long as possible
  • swappiness=100 tells the kernel to aggressively swap processes out of physical memory and move them to swap cache

The default setting in Ubuntu is swappiness=60. Reducing the default value of swappiness will probably improve overall performance for a typical Ubuntu desktop installation. A value of swappiness=10 is recommended, but feel free to experiment. Note: Ubuntu server installations have different performance requirements to desktop systems, and the default value of 60 is likely more suitable.


Emphasis on the part that says: Reducing the default value of swappiness will probably improve overall performance for a typical Ubuntu desktop installation

I hope this helps to stop the freezes on my machine. And top tip for the day: If you want to improve the performance of you machine reduce the swappines specially if you have lots of RAM

Instructions are on the link provided and if the line is not there add it: vm.swappiness=x

r carles

Nicola Di Marzo

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Jun 1, 2012, 6:10:18 AM6/1/12
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yeah, oh this sounds new & very useful info to me..good to know.thanks
But i still wonder why you hadn't any of these problems with 11.10 (at least insn't it ?)

Another thing, maybe you can try to update every installed package with an:
sudo apt-get upgrade
keeping all the repositories activate.
Maybe someone already added a fix between the updates...
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