# Unknown Freezes!

## drbroccoli

Ok, you guys will probably laugh at me: I hate no idea what is causing these freezes. I installed recently, a few days ago, and since then, my machine has been freezing. Sometimes it takes a few hours, others a few days. I have never seen it happen. Where do I start the diagnosis process? Please help me!

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## asiB4

Is it freezing while just sitting there, doing nothing? Is there a particular application you are running when it freezes? Recently installed what, gentoo itself? Have you checked logs for any error messages?

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## EzInKy

By freezing do you mean the keyboard and mouse or not responding? Is there any disk activity going on?

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## drbroccoli

This is a new Gentoo install. As for programs, nothing weird. Gnome, firefox, terminal. I have a few applets.  One thing I have noticed though is that ACPI spits out a lot of error messages, but as for the most recent freeze, acpi didn't give an error for a half hour before the incident, as says /var/log/messages. I don't believe there to be any disk movement. It may be the keyboard and mouse, but it seems genuinely frozen. Oh, and in all cases, the screen was blank (set instead of screen saver) or the screen saver was frozen. The monitor is still on. Not turned off, so you can still see the backlight against the blackness. Any suggestions?

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## EzInKy

I was asking about the disk access because if some app had a bad memory leak it could slow the system to crawl as swap was used. You know what I mean if you've ever tried to use Pan on an extremely large newgroup. 

So the freeze alway seems to be when the monitor blanks? Do you have DPMS turned on in your xorg.conf? If ACPI is giving a lot of errors you might try disabling support for everything except maybe the fan, processor, and the power management timer and see if that helps.

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## drbroccoli

Don't think it's a memory leak. The disk no longer churns. I do have DPMS turned on. What does this mean? As for ACPI, how do I tweak it so?

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## mikegpitt

If your machine is freezing then it means your kernel or a kernel module crashed.  Have you installed any modules not included with the regular kernel?

Also do you get any errors in /var/log/messages?  If there was an error, it will show in the log right before the new log stuff appears after a fresh boot (usually right before "syslog-ng starting").

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## EzInKy

 *drbroccoli wrote:*   

> Don't think it's a memory leak. The disk no longer churns. I do have DPMS turned on. What does this mean? As for ACPI, how do I tweak it so?

 

DPMS is power management for the monitor, you may want to try turning it off. You can tweak ACPI in your kernel config.

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## drbroccoli

Ok, so how do I turn DPMS off? Just comment out the line Option "DPMS" in xorg.conf?

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## drbroccoli

 *mikegpitt wrote:*   

> If your machine is freezing then it means your kernel or a kernel module crashed.  Have you installed any modules not included with the regular kernel?
> 
> Also do you get any errors in /var/log/messages?  If there was an error, it will show in the log right before the new log stuff appears after a fresh boot (usually right before "syslog-ng starting").

 

Ah yes. I checked that. I did install nvidia drivers, but they don't pop up in the log file.

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## GauSs_

 *drbroccoli wrote:*   

>  Oh, and in all cases, the screen was blank (set instead of screen saver) or the screen saver was frozen. The monitor is still on. Not turned off, so you can still see the backlight against the blackness. 

 

I have the same problem here. Using just the ttyX.

I've noticed that when that happens i can't turn my 

Caps/Num Lock light On/Off on keyboard.

Also if it happens when i do "emerge ..." and i wait until it's over

i can bring it back by pushing Alt or some other button.

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