[conspire] Mysterious freeze-ups (was: Happy New Preferred Application!)

[Rick Moen]

Changing your Subject header, which was cute but uninformative.

Quoting rogerchrisman at gmail.com (rogerchrisman at gmail.com):

> Oops, crashed again. Display and input freeze. No display corruption,
> just frozen in time.

Well, that's definitely _different_ from the X11 display semi-dissolving
into little blocky things (or squares or wavy lines, or whatever it was
you said).  But it's also difficult to nail down to a root cause.  I
tend to think something like that indicates dodgy hardware that suddenly
has a coronary and results in the visual symptom of an apparent
total-freeze, but that's a surmise and not supported by evidence.

Am guessing that "frozen" includes the mouse pointer, which is pretty
much the last bit of X11 functionality to go when _software_-level
problems cause a visual effect of 'freezing'.  Perhaps you can confirm.

If there are LEDs on your keyboard to indicate things like CapLock or
NumLock, when you observe a "freeze" like that on-screen, it is
worthwhile toggling the keys that, in normal operation would switch
those LEDs on or off.  If perchance even _that_ no longer works, then
that's strong evidence of a serious hardware problem in the motherboard
or CPU.

But, once again, I'll point out that you can use a Linux live distro
(booted from a USB stick) to get a bit of parallax on the problem, e.g.,
find out whether the problem persists if running a quite different OS
setup that uses nothing at all of your installed system on the HD or
SSD.

Last, it's worthwhile keeping an eye out for what if anything correlates
with when the freeze occurs.  Long ago, I had a problem that correlated
strongly with the system running long enough to reach elevated operating
temperature.  Once I spotted this apparent correlation, I tested my
hunch by doing something that generated heat faster, in this case doing
kernel compilation.  Sure enough, the problem arrived sooner.

It turned out, I'd made a bonehead error concerning the CPU heat sink,
and inadvertently thereby caused heat buildup.
If there are LEDs on your keyboard to indicate things like CapLock or
NumLock, when you observe a "freeze" like that on-screen, it is
worthwhile toggling the keys that, in normal operation would switch
those LEDs on or off.  If perchance even _that_ no longer works, then
that's strong evidence of a serious hardware problem in the motherboard
or CPU.

But, once again, I'll point out that you can use a Linux live distro
(booted from a USB stick) to get a bit of parallax on the problem, e.g.,
find out whether the problem persists if running a quite different OS
setup that uses nothing at all of your installed system on the HD or
SSD.

Last, it's worthwhile keeping an eye out for what if anything correlates
with when the freeze occurs.  Long ago, I had a problem that correlated
strongly with the system running long enough to reach elevated operating
temperature.  Once I spotted this apparent correlation, I tested my
hunch by doing something that generated heat faster, in this case doing
kernel compilation.  Sure enough, the problem arrived sooner.

It turned out, I'd made a bonehead error concerning the CPU heat sink,
and inadvertently thereby caused heat buildup.a  (Long story, but this
was an AMD K6, an awesome CPU that was almost totally impervious to
being destroyed by owner incompetence such as putting the heatsink on
180 degrees rotated, thereby putting it in contact with only about 20%
of the CPU top surface.)

-- 
Cheers,                         "2021 showed up, and told 2020 'hold my beer.'"
Rick Moen                                                   -- @justinaireland
rick at linuxmafia.com
McQ! (4x80)