[lug] Help with window manager "lockups"

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 14:58 -0600, Zan Lynx wrote:
> I ran into this on my Gentoo laptop since I foolishly switched to
> PulseAudio on it.  I don't know why, since it's no better than using
> ALSA/dmix directly.  I suppose I was hoping for something impressive.
> 
> You should be able to see if this is the problem by using SSH to log
> into the FC9 machine or switching to a text terminal, then do "ps xa" to
> find the metacity process, then "strace -p [metacity-pid]".  If you see
> it spamming write and SIGPIPE, this is the problem.

Ran into the problem today.  I was prepared a little better for it,
however.  Unfortunately, I'm no closer to solving it.  Here are my
notes:

strace on xfwm4 gives this repeatedly:
read(3, 0x9d72854, 4096)                = -1 EAGAIN (Resource
temporarily unavailable)

No NFS mounts appear to be hung, which would be my first guess.
Killing xfwm4 and restarting with the same and no session management id
had no affect (though I could kill and restart it, unlike with
metacity).
Killing pulseaudio daemon and restarting had no affect.
Killing pulseaudio daemon and restarting xfwm4 had no affect.

Did not switch workspaces this time - so it's not related to that.
Ran strace on /usr/libexec/gnome-vfs-daemon and it never printed
anything.  Looked hung, but hard to tell if I waited long enough.  Might
not do anything until someone tells it to.  Killed and restarted it and
it did the same thing.
Tried killing and restarted various gvfs related processes with no
affect.

Other processes which show the same EAGAIN error:
    Gnome-terminal
    /usr/bin/xfce4-session
    xfce-mcs-manager

Still no clue as to what's causing this.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you 
realize it was your money to start with.