Re: Xfree86 taking up 99% of cpu and hanging system
I had this problem as well. Except on my particular system, I ran woody, and recompiled a patched openmosix kernel.
I never solved it unfortunately. I would like to see how this is resolved. Sometimes, when I sshd in, and killed the
99% process, it would recover, and bring me back to the gui login screen. Other times it just hung. Completely
unresponsive to local I/O devices like keyboard, mouse and monitor. At any point though, I could always remote connect
in using ssh or telnet into the machine. But the local I/O sometimes didn't recover unless I rebooted.
A few things I was told to try were things like
$dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
and checking my config files for various things like glx, glcore and so on... (some things should be set, others not, I
can't remember what is what, just google those. there are tons of sites on the net that talk about video drivers and
things like glx)
nothing ever fixed the system. So I can't login through gui on that machine. On the plus side, I only use that machine
to run X apps on other machines, so I never have to login at the gui for that machine. I telnet in and run apps
remotely off it. I don't encounter the problem this way.
-doug
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mitchell Laks" <mlaks@verizon.net>
To: <debian-user@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 2:15 PM
Subject: Xfree86 taking up 99% of cpu and hanging system
> Hi,
> suddenly I have my debian sid system/ running KDE freezing
> and
> when i ssh from another system and when I run top
> i see
>
> 7063 root 25 0 0 0 0 R 99.8 0.0 14:33.81 XFree86
> 1 root 16 0 1500 484 1344 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.57 init
>
> so XFree86 is full use of cpu.
>
> I then run kill -9 7063 as root and then contrinue to monitor top i still see
> it persist
>
> and then i kill a number of other processes and still
> 7063 root 25 0 0 0 0 R 99.8 0.0 21:26.62 XFree86
> 1 root 16 0 1500 484 1344 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.57 init
> 2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.09 migration/0
> 3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 ksoftirqd/0
>
> and then the system still doesnt respond. i try ctl-alt F2 to get a console
> and no improvement.
>
> I finally have to shutdown -r now to get my machine back.
>
> how can i diagnose what is causing the problem and how to use my login via ssh
> and restore system without shutdown -r noww?
>
> thanks,
> Mitchell
>
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