Bug#971343: Animated background/wallpaper (changing over time) causes system freeze on Nouveau

[Simon McVittie]

Control: reassign -1 gnome-shell
Control: tags -1 + moreinfo bullseye sid
Control: retitle -1 Animated background/wallpaper (changing over time) causes system freeze on Nouveau

Retitling to make this show up in more searches.

gnome-control-center just changes settings, and it is GNOME Shell that is
actually responsible for setting the wallpaper. Please run
"reportbug --template gnome-shell" and send the result to this bug
address so that we have details of the version you are using, including
its dependencies.

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 00:46:25 -0300, Leandro Cunha wrote:
> When changing the wallpaper to the one that changes throughout the day in both
> sections xorg and wayland through the gnome control center

gnome-control-center does not have separate sections for Xorg and
Wayland settings. Do you mean this affects both the Xorg and Wayland
session types?

> the system freezes
> using nouveau and it is necessary to force the system shutdown

How quickly does this happen? (Within seconds/minutes/hours/days?)

If your keyboard has a Caps Lock or Num Lock light, can you still
toggle it by pressing the appropriate key after the freeze has occurred?
(I ask because it gives an indication of how many layers of the system
have frozen)

Similarly, after the freeze occurs, does the system respond to repeated
presses of Ctrl+Alt+Delete? (Pressing it more than 7 times in 2 seconds
might cause systemd to do a controlled reboot, even if no change is
visible on the screen.)

If Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn't work, does the system respond to
the "magic sysrq key" sequences, in particular AltGr+SysRq+o
(immediate power off) and AltGr+SysRq+b (immediate reboot)? (See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key for more details)

After forcing the system off and rebooting, are there errors or warnings
logged in /var/log/syslog or the systemd journal? To make journal messages
persist across reboots, you would have to enable the persistent mode of
the journal by creating the directory /var/log/journal (I can't remember
whether this is done by default yet).

What hardware are you running on? (In particular, is it a laptop or
desktop, and which NVIDIA graphics device does it have?)

> As the problem
> occurs in other distributions and I found out by doing tests I put the upstream
> tag.

Do you have any references for bug reports in other distributions about
this? Or, if you tested other distributions yourself, which ones?

> I haven't tested the current version 3.38

Please provide the information above first, and then upgrade GNOME
packages (particularly gnome-shell and gnome-control-center) to their
versions from unstable and try again.

Thanks,
    smcv