Re: [LAU] Hard lock-ups -- Trying to narrow the cause

On Fri, 22 May 2009, Nick Copeland wrote:

>> The mouse pointer still moving, though, has been common enough hang that
>> it stands out in my memory.
>
> If the mouse still moves then you may be able to try giving a Control/Alt/Backspace to see if you can restart the X Server and login again, that does depend on how dead the system is but mouse motion means that you may also have keyboard control to some extent.

If the keyboard is locked up (I used to get these with an OpenOffice/Xkbd
bug), this may not work. When that happens, to recover without a reboot I
have to SSH into the machine and explicitly kill both X and the
application that hanged.

# pkill -9 soffice
# /etc/init.d/kdm stop
# pkill -9 kdm
# pkill -9 X

And then check 'ps' to see if anything else needs killing.

After everything is dead, I was usually able to restart X, but the video
drivers would be messed up -- so virtual consoles would be unavail
(scrambled sceen). X would be fine, but sometimes a little more sluggish.

However, even if X has the keyboard locked up, the Ctrl+Alt+SysRq stuff
for the kernel will still work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

HTH,
Gabriel

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Received on Fri May 22 20:15:01 2009