Greetings Almighty Community,
Over the course of last summer I began having “random” freezes on TTY7/X display so I thought I should share this with you guys because I am reaching the end of my sanity.
The scenario is this: video idle for over 10 minutes, the screensaver kicked in some time ago and is working great, a non-intensive session(in terms of DoS) is running in the background and life’s good.
When I come back however, key in my password, I am now facing a frozen X desktop. What I mean by this is that ALT+TAB doesn’t work, CTRL+ALT+ARROWS do not work, mouse focus does not work (yet the mouse cursor does work) and no actions can be done via the focus of the keyboard either. At this point my only resolution was to select any terminal TTYs from 1-6 and then kill the VirtualBox processes (The one associated to the VM running itself, not the PID of /usr/bin/virtualbox).
Then going back to TTY7, activity had picked back up and I could then use the mouse and keyboard focuses again, same as ALT+TAB, etc.
Over the last couple of weeks/months, I have noticed this only happened as I had a VM running. "Duckduckgo"ing it showed me some indicators that there might be an issue in between Ubuntu latest and ATI driver.
Before going any further, here are my box specs:
$ neofetch
.-/+oossssoo+/-. user@host
:+ssssssssssssssssss+: -----------
-+ssssssssssssssssssyyssss± OS: Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS x86_64
.ossssssssssssssssssdMMMNysssso. Kernel: 4.15.0-39-generic
/ssssssssssshdmmNNmmyNMMMMhssssss/ Uptime: 8 days, 15 hours, 9 mins
+ssssssssshmydMMMMMMMNddddyssssssss+ Packages: 2911
/sssssssshNMMMyhhyyyyhmNMMMNhssssssss/ Shell: zsh 5.4.2
.ssssssssdMMMNhsssssssssshNMMMdssssssss. Resolution: 1920x1080
+sssshhhyNMMNyssssssssssssyNMMMysssssss+ DE: MATE
ossyNMMMNyMMhsssssssssssssshmmmhssssssso WM: Metacity (Marco)
ossyNMMMNyMMhsssssssssssssshmmmhssssssso WM Theme: Blue-Submarine
+sssshhhyNMMNyssssssssssssyNMMMysssssss+ Theme: Blue-Submarine [GTK2/3]
.ssssssssdMMMNhsssssssssshNMMMdssssssss. Icons: Mate [GTK2/3]
/sssssssshNMMMyhhyyyyhdNMMMNhssssssss/ Terminal: terminator
+sssssssssdmydMMMMMMMMddddyssssssss+ CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X (12) @ 3.600G
/ssssssssssshdmNNNNmyNMMMMhssssss/ GPU: AMD Radeon RX 460/560D
.ossssssssssssssssssdMMMNysssso. Memory: 3111MiB / 32165MiB
-+sssssssssssssssssyyyssss±
:+ssssssssssssssssss+:
.-/+oossssoo+/-.
Another good point to mention is that I try to always apply the latest patches and have been having this issue no matter which versioning had been deployed. At the time of writing, I am still running latest everything that Ubuntu MATE 18.04.1 allows me to update/upgrade to.
So last week I decided to migrate my remaining windoze apps into WINE so I could stop using VBox and hopefully fix this problem once and for all. Now, running the same set of binaries in X and 1 application in WINE, today, I had exactly the same TTY7 freeze. The problem this time is that I was not able to save my session because even when I killed all of my PIDs could had been suspecious TTY7 still ended up in a frozen and unusable state.
What I ended up doing was CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to logoff X and relaunch everything which worked.
Moving my reflection a bit further now: since the latest kernel deployed for 18.04.1 is branched at 4.15 and that Linux is well ahead of 4.19 (and that my online researches hinted me of a glitch in between some vbox-utils and 4.15.x kernels) my next idea was: let’s upgrade manually to the latest kernel myself and see if that fixes things and improves performances.
Having read the following, I am not sure that I am on the right path anymore:
Therefore, I would like to know, oh Precious Community, the following from you:
-
Is there an easy method for me to upgrade to latest kernel while keeping it automatically rolled out to the latest version in UM LTS latest? For example, if I wget the .tar.gz, compile and install it, next time there’s a new kernel coming out will I need to manually update until Ubuntu and kernels are in synched (from what I understand, Ubuntu will never run anywhere close to the very latest kernel for stability reasons)?
-
Has anybody heard/experienced any of those “random” Xorg/TTY7 freezes with ATI hardware (preferably R560 or same generation) while using Vbox/WINE? And if so, what has been your fix for this?
Thanks in advance for all of your smart inputs.
<3