Re: [gentoo-user] Re: problem which makes gnome unusable

[Fernando Rodriguez]

On Friday, November 06, 2015 1:46:08 PM walt wrote:
> On Fri, 06 Nov 2015 14:45:43 -0500
> covici@××××××××××.com wrote:
>
> > Hi.  I am having a very bad problem which makes gnome unusable --
> > once I get into the virtual console where the xserver is displaying
> > gnome, console 12 in my case, I can never get out of that console --
> > control-alt-f1 or anything does not work.  If I try to ssh in from
> > somewhere else, I cannot stop gdm because the x server will not stop
> > -- even kill -9 will not stop it and I have to reboot the system.
>
> The part about kill -9 failing is exactly the problem I had with the
> 3.18.x kernel series a while ago.  I know this problem must be hardware
> specific because some distros are still shipping 3.18 kernels as the
> default, and I'll bet others in this mailing list are using it without
> problems too.  I had some scary problems with that kernel version
> that were very difficult to diagnose until I just rebooted with an
> older kernel and the scary problems vanished.  The 4.2 series seems
> okay so far on my VMs. (Even my gentoo VMs had some minor problems with
> 3.18.x)

I've been using 3.18.x for a while now and I only had a very similar problem 
when I updated to 3.18.23 about a week or so ago. Everytime I ran sudo the 
desktop would become unresponsive and if I tried to switch to another VT it 
would freeze completely. I didn't tried to ssh in, but the SysRq keys worked 
for rebooting. I could reproduce it everytime with 3.18.23 so I went back to 
3.18.22. There where two updates to the sudo package since then and yesterday 
I tried booting 3.18.23 and it worked fine so it was the sudo-1.8.12 and kernel 
3.18.23 combo that caused it. Now I'm using 3.18.24 without problems. I use 
kde and ati-drivers.

-- 
Fernando Rodriguez