Xfce Forum

Tio

Member

Registered: 2021-09-26

Posts: 92

Crashes every 2-3 days randomly

I use the latest stable XFCE + Arch. I use Nvidia GTX10 with proprietary drivers. I can hear my laptop's fan dropping speed suddenly and nothing moves on the screen. TTY doesn't work. Nothing works. I have to turn it off from the power button. Are you guys aware of such a fatal crash on XFCE + Nvidia? I have used Gnome for the past years till a few months ago when I switched to XFCE, and I don't remember to have experienced this.

mint4all

Member

From: off the map

Registered: 2018-08-21

Posts: 276

Re: Crashes every 2-3 days randomly

I use the latest stable XFCE + Arch. I use Nvidia GTX10 with proprietary drivers. I can hear my laptop's fan dropping speed suddenly and nothing moves on the screen. TTY doesn't work. Nothing works. I have to turn it off from the power button. Are you guys aware of such a fatal crash on XFCE + Nvidia? I have used Gnome for the past years till a few months ago when I switched to XFCE, and I don't remember to have experienced this.

Greetings to you, and welcome to the forum! My apology for this late reply ...

Fwiw: over time, i've had 3 laptops (dell, hp) and 2 desktops (dell, imac) freezing up like your laptop does. In all cases, the cause turned out to be memory-related. The laptops had failing disk drives that impaired the kernel's access to virtual-memory (swap partition or swap file), and the desktops had defective memory modules (thermal faults) which impaired the kernel's access to cached pages. Your laptop's slowing fan could be an indication of such a failure -- the cpu's cores appear to be idling while waiting for the necessary disk/memory i/o to complete ...

Though i don't run arch (only ubuntu-based mint), perhaps look at this old thread @ https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=14659 and report back what you find out on your laptop. In addition, please run the

inxi -Fxzi

command and post back the output to get an idea how your laptop is configured.

Cheers, m4a

Last edited by mint4all (2021-12-17 20:01:09)

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Linux Mint 21.3 -- xfce 4.18 ... Apple iMAC -- Lenovo, Dell, HP Desktops and Laptops -- Family & Community Support

Tio

Member

Registered: 2021-09-26

Posts: 92

Re: Crashes every 2-3 days randomly

Thank you very much for your reply. I managed to figure what then issue was. The XFCE compositor + Nvidia drivers... This did it for me "xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -s glx".

mint4all

Member

From: off the map

Registered: 2018-08-21

Posts: 276

Re: Crashes every 2-3 days randomly

Thank you very much for your reply. I managed to figure what then issue was. The XFCE compositor + Nvidia drivers... This did it for me "xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/vblank_mode -s glx".

Well well well -- thanks a lot for this tip. I am working right now on an old dell desktop (2009 vintage) with an add-on, very old FX560 nvidia card. Random gui lockups galore. Since the drive is healthy, and the ram checks out, I was stumped ... So i just checked and found out that this particular xfwm4 setting (unexposed in the gui) was set to "auto" instead of "glx". Per your reply i tweaked it and will report back if it fixes this particular system (xfce 4.16 + xfce compositor + latest nvidia driver).

Cheers, m4a

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Linux Mint 21.3 -- xfce 4.18 ... Apple iMAC -- Lenovo, Dell, HP Desktops and Laptops -- Family & Community Support

Tio

Member

Registered: 2021-09-26

Posts: 92

Re: Crashes every 2-3 days randomly

See this post to get more answers for this issue https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/-/issues/615