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September 26, 2005

Xorg hangs...

...and it seems to be related to something in Mozilla. That bug I found still seems to be stuck in assigned. Red Hat was telling people to upgrade.

Xorg hangs fairly regularly when we're using Firefox or Thunderbird. I get a situation where Xorg is eating up 99.x% of CPU time according to top. Usually I can plug a laptop in and dhcpd still responds, so the laptop gets a connection and I go in over ssh to clean up.

Cleaning up means:

  1. Find the pid for xorg and kill -9 it.
    At this point everything in the session gets lost but I still...
  2. pkill -u <user> to finish off the processes still alive after xorg dies.
  3. If gdm doesn't take give me another login screen, kill any extra gdms, and sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart.
    Regularly when xorg dies from an abrupt kill, Gnome display manager gets confused.

The painful parts of this are not only that you lose whatever you were doing, but you also have to get a laptop out and boot it just to do the maintenance.

Mr. Bones suggests commenting out Option "RenderAccel" "true" in xorg.conf. I'm going to try that.

Posted by Mark at September 26, 2005 09:54 PM

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