Bug#670097: gnome-shell: random hang causes data loss

Fabian Steffen fast at neteye.ch
Wed May 2 16:36:31 UTC 2012


Hi

I can confirm this issue from multiple workstations with different 
hardware confifigurations.

Several colleagues at my workplace have workstations running wheezy and 
all of them has this frequent freezes.

My machine has an intel 965gm, my colleage next to me has an nvidia card 
and is using the non-free drivers.

The freezes occurs from the beginning (gnome-shell 3.0), but got rarer 
since version 3.2.
In most cases i'm switching to a tty, use killall gnome-shell, switching
back... it restarts automatically... and everything is fine. In fewer 
than 5% of the freezes this doesn't help, and it is a bit trickier to 
get it working again without restarting gdm.

It can't really been reproduced but here is my list of what i was doing 
in most of the cases:

- in over 90% of the cases i was switching the workspace with the 
keyboard (in 100% of this cases i was switching/moving to the above 
workspace... this, of course, can be a coincidence)

- in about 50% of the above cases on the current workspace was a 
fullscreen VMware-Image running, i "ungrabbed" the input by pressing 
ctrl+alt and afterward the keybinding to move to the above workspace

- in about 10% of the above cases i was connected to a beamer in 
mirrored view


I'm hoping this issue is be fixed in gnome-shell 3.4 as several bugs in 
"this direction" got fixed.

e.g.

3.3.4 [0]:
...
* Fix several crashers related to updating workspace thumbnails [Owen; 
#667652]
...

3.3.92 [1]:
...
* Fix hangs that could occur when switching away to a VT [Ray; #653833]
...

I therefor would wait until 3.4 hits unstable and wait a month to get 
some a reliable statement. In the meanwhile i would request to decrease 
the severity of this but to important as it happens not that often.


Cheers Fabian

[0] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-shell/3.3/gnome-shell-3.3.4.news
[1] 
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-shell/3.3/gnome-shell-3.3.92.news





More information about the pkg-gnome-maintainers mailing list