[lug] Help with window manager "lockups"

[Hugh Brown]

Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> 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.
> 


I'd try setting syslog to capture kernel.debug to a separate file as 
well as loading the debug symbols for whichever programs you want to 
watch and then try and get a stacktrace.

Hugh