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[W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

W530/W540/W541/W550 Series
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bit_twiddler
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#61 Post by bit_twiddler » Wed Mar 04, 2015 7:01 pm

The last time that I played around with the Linux kernel was back in the mid-90s,
so I can only provide some general advice. First off, we don't really know that
the kernel is crashing, just that the gui freezes. If you have another machine
around, you might try ssh-ing into your W530 to see if it is still alive.

So, maybe (hopefully) I jumped the gun here.

You probably have an ssh client and server package that installs fairly
easily, so I would try that. Usually, when the kernel crashes, you'll
get a panic (which is just a backtrace of some kernel thread that
failed some invariant). But, you're not getting that so I'm not
sure exactly what is going on.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#62 Post by RasmusP » Wed Mar 04, 2015 8:22 pm

bit_twiddler wrote:The last time that I played around with the Linux kernel was back in the mid-90s,
so I can only provide some general advice. First off, we don't really know that
the kernel is crashing, just that the gui freezes. If you have another machine
around, you might try ssh-ing into your W530 to see if it is still alive.
No. It crashes. The other issue I have been seeing is freezing after return from suspend. Here, the computer restarts on iGPU load, and it does so in a "hard" way. IOW: it's like I reboot "by force" unlike the reboot process I'd experience if I'd issued systemctl reboot.
You probably have an ssh client and server package that installs fairly
easily, so I would try that. Usually, when the kernel crashes, you'll
get a panic (which is just a backtrace of some kernel thread that
failed some invariant). But, you're not getting that so I'm not
sure exactly what is going on.
I can ssh into it, sure, but I perhaps it's also possible to have the computer store logs persistently if it does not do so already.

Thanks,

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#63 Post by bit_twiddler » Thu Mar 05, 2015 12:55 am

No. It crashes. The other issue I have been seeing is freezing after return from suspend. Here, the computer restarts on iGPU load, and it does so in a "hard" way. IOW: it's like I reboot "by force" unlike the reboot process I'd experience if I'd issued systemctl reboot.
So, you get a Thinkpad BIOS screen, like you held down the power button?
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#64 Post by RasmusP » Thu Mar 05, 2015 4:43 am

Correct. The screen goes black for a second, then the computer restarts and the initial Thinkpad screen is shown.

Edit: W7 ran for 6-8 hours without a crash.

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#65 Post by bit_twiddler » Thu Mar 05, 2015 12:08 pm

You're not getting a classic kernel panic, which is what the kernel does when it figures
out that it has been hosed. Or, you can't see it because of your graphics problem.

Back in the 80s I worked at a Unix workstation vendor, and we had a watchdog
timer that periodically woke up a process that ran in parallel with the
kernel. The watchdog process pinged the kernel to see if it was
still alive. If it wasn't, then the watch dog optionally dumped core
and rebooted the system.

Probably the Linux way to do the same thing is to use Kdump;
you want to get it to dump a core image on the disk.

Here are some instructions:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_us ... el_crashes

Fedora/RH/Centos/SL looks to be a little easier to set up than Arch, which requires you
to build a new kernel. Once you capture the crash, you can look at it using the 'crash' tool or gdb.

I would recommend rounding up an extra 2.5" drive for this purpose, and installing Linux
on it for this purpose. The file system is likely to be unstable and easily corrupted
under crash conditions.

Mind you, I've never done this under Linux, just Unix in the old days (actually we had BSD.)
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#66 Post by RasmusP » Thu Mar 05, 2015 1:40 pm

I think it's not a regular kernel panic. It looks like a "hardware response" as if the CPU was too hot (it's <90C). Graphics work fine up to the point that it restarts.

I realized that you can easily get the logs from last boot with journalctl, I so I will try to dig out those and see if they reveal stuff. Otherwise, I will have to get cracking at producing the data required for a proper bug report.

I could try to install Fedora alongside W7 on my new drive. It's got a whooping 250GB anyway. I'm sure the clever folks at Fedora/RH figured out how to configure grub to allow the coexistance of both systems by now.

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#67 Post by bit_twiddler » Thu Mar 05, 2015 2:04 pm

I could try to install Fedora alongside W7 on my new drive. It's got a whooping 250GB anyway. I'm sure the clever folks at Fedora/RH figured out how to configure grub to allow the coexistance of both systems by now.
The best way is really a separate drive, because the problem is not the Fedora/RH people who are clobbering the
boot sector, it's the other way around. You might be able to chain boot Fedora from W7.

If you really have more time than money you might take a look at BCDEdit.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#68 Post by RasmusP » Thu Mar 05, 2015 2:56 pm

An interesting development: My brother got the W530 (with the extreme edition cpu) from a retailer who just wanted to get rid of his last W530.

His computer crashed at the 30th minut of Furmark on Debian Sid!

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#69 Post by bit_twiddler » Thu Mar 05, 2015 3:00 pm

This is good news because now you and your brother can run twice
as many experiments to see what the problem is.

Even if you are getting a hardware crash due to a sensor being
out of bounds, the interrupt generated by that needs to be processed
by something. I'd look for that in /var/log somewhere.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#70 Post by RasmusP » Thu Mar 05, 2015 6:11 pm

Here's the upstream bug report.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89451

I have long recommended Fedora to anybody who cared to listen, but I must say it's impressed me even more tonight. The guides for generating the relevant output on the Fedora wiki are great.

It installed in less than 10 minutes and it's really polished. Oh, after installing it I had 1045 packages to update. It took five minutes (for comparison, the 114 updates on W7 took more than an hour and required several reboots). I don't know if the chainloading of wndows is stable enough to survive yet.

Thanks again

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#71 Post by bit_twiddler » Thu Mar 05, 2015 6:36 pm

That's excellent work. Especially getting the Xorg.bin backtrace!
I'm sure that will prove very useful as a starting point for whomever
works on this bug.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#72 Post by RasmusP » Fri Mar 06, 2015 5:40 pm

bit_twiddler in pm wrote: [...]how did the Intel guy come to the conclusion that the hardware
was shut down by the BIOS? I don't see how he got that
from the log. In fact, your output of journalctl -b-1 -e_COMM=Xorg.bin
shows the X server catching a SEGV, which obviously happened
before the machine shut down.
That is extending beyond my understanding of unix-like systems. I am a happy 'consumer' of low-level code, and only understand the concepts and ideas at a cursory level.

However, I did notice that it looks like systemd is shutting down "properly", which is certainly not obvious from looking at the machine (the usual logs whne shutting down with systemd are not displayed). Perhaps I should produce netcat logs of a clean shutdown.

The logs are generally a product of carefully following the Fedora guides. As I said, I'm highly impressed with at least the last two releases of Fedora.
Also, what is the machine type and model of your machine, and
what version of the BIOS do you have running in it?
From this file where I manually typed (almost) all the bios settings:

• UEFI BIOS version: G5ETA1WW (2.61)
• UEFI BIOS Date: 2015-01-22
• Embedded Controller Version: G4HT39WW (1.13)
• Machine Type Model: 255150G

But I have had the problem for a very long time, also long before I started the present thread.

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#73 Post by bit_twiddler » Fri Mar 06, 2015 7:52 pm

I suggest broadening the search a little bit by gathering more information.
For example it would be nice to have comparable information about your
brother's machine. Also, perhaps you could contact the author of Furmark
to see if he/she has any results from similar machines (Ivy Bridge, HD4000)

The backtrace that you got:

Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE)
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) Backtrace:
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 0: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (OsLookupColor+0x119) [0x59c739]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 1: /lib64/libc.so.6 (__restore_rt+0x0) [0x7f39700e595f]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 2: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (present_extension_init+0x11c) [0x51970c]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 3: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (present_extension_init+0x53c) [0x519f0c]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 4: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (PanoramiXRenderReset+0x21a3) [0x51b0d3]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 5: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (CompositeRegisterImplicitRedirectionException+0x3f58) [0x4d1178]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 6: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (PanoramiXRenderReset+0x854) [0x517dc4]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 7: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (remove_fs_handlers+0x527) [0x43d427]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 8: /lib64/libc.so.6 (__libc_start_main+0xf0) [0x7f39700d0fe0]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 9: /usr/libexec/Xorg.bin (_start+0x29) [0x4276ee]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) 10: ? (?+0x29) [0x29]
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE)
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) Segmentation fault at address 0x10
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE)
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: Fatal server error:
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) Caught signal 11 (Segmentation fault). Server aborting
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE)
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE)
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: Please consult the Fedora Project support
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: at http://wiki.x.org
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: for help.
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE) Please also check the log file at "/dev/null" for additional information.
Mar 05 21:54:33 localhost.localdomain gdm-Xorg-:0[1295]: (EE)

looks very similar to this bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1172232

and, may, in fact, be the same bug. If this is true, then it may have been fixed by commits to
the i915 driver (see comments 5 & 11 in the thread.)

If this is true, then you just have to wait for the patch to be released as part of their
release cycle, and retest.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#74 Post by RasmusP » Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:22 pm

bit_twiddler wrote:I suggest broadening the search a little bit by gathering more information.
For example it would be nice to have comparable information about your
brother's machine. Also, perhaps you could contact the author of Furmark
to see if he/she has any results from similar machines (Ivy Bridge, HD4000)
I'll see if I can have my brother record some similar tests. The RAM, bios and CPU may differ. Otherwise the machines should be identical, though.
looks very similar to this bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1172232 [...]

and, may, in fact, be the same bug. If this is true, then it may have been fixed by commits to
the i915 driver (see comments 5 & 11 in the thread.)

If this is true, then you just have to wait for the patch to be released as part of their
release cycle, and retest.
The commit they linked to is from December and the latest Intel driver, 2.99.917, is from January so I should have this fix already on Arch. Unless that commit somehow didn't make it into the 2.99.917. Assuming it made it, something else is going on.

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#75 Post by bit_twiddler » Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:38 pm

Looks like Chris Wilson fixed this bug in December. But, it can take
months for a bug fix to make its way to the next release.

One way to check if you are running with this bug fix would be
to download the source rpm for your driver and take a look to see if the patch
is in there.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#76 Post by RasmusP » Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:47 pm

bit_twiddler wrote:Looks like Chris Wilson fixed this bug in December. But, it can take
months for a bug fix to make its way to the next release.

One way to check if you are running with this bug fix would be
to download the source rpm for your driver and take a look to see if the patch
is in there.
In this case there's a shortcut. The fix is mentioned in the changelog. So it's another error that may be quite similar.

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#77 Post by bit_twiddler » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:01 pm

Yes, it does look like Chris Wilson's 12-11-2014 fix is in there.
If you want to invest the time to learn about debugging, you could
set up a system without a display manager and start the
X server under gdb, and hopefully it will crash on you in
a predictable manner.

David Arlie probably got thrown off the track because you
sent him too much information; in one case you've gotten
a clear backtrace, but when you loaded some extra modules
the backtrace didn't appear in your log. This is not unusual;
if things get moved around in memory a bug can exhibit
different behavior.

If I were to guess, it would be that someone (X server, mesa, or the intel
driver) is chasing a bad pointer, because there is no code in libc
that calls the X server.

But, before doing all that I would try to collect more failure cases
from the Furmark author, and Dell and HP Ivy Bridge laptop users.
It has to be a laptop user because the desktop graphics are
completely different.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#78 Post by RasmusP » Sat Mar 07, 2015 7:04 am

bit_twiddler wrote:Yes, it does look like Chris Wilson's 12-11-2014 fix is in there.
If you want to invest the time to learn about debugging, you could
set up a system without a display manager and start the
X server under gdb, and hopefully it will crash on you in
a predictable manner.
David Arlie probably got thrown off the track because you
sent him too much information;
Who? I provided the info 01.org requests... but it's an awful lot of attachments.
But, before doing all that I would try to collect more failure cases
from the Furmark author, and Dell and HP Ivy Bridge laptop users.
It has to be a laptop user because the desktop graphics are
completely different.
I'm not aware of anybody with Ivy Bridge laptops that would be able to generate the logs. my brother will try to collect such info during the weekend.

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#79 Post by RasmusP » Sat Mar 07, 2015 7:29 am

bit_twiddler wrote:Yes, it does look like Chris Wilson's 12-11-2014 fix is in there.
If you want to invest the time to learn about debugging, you could
set up a system without a display manager and start the
X server under gdb, and hopefully it will crash on you in
a predictable manner.
Nope, there's no backtrace. I start Xorg and start it in gdb on my second machine. I type cont start Furmark and the computer restarts, but no message is emitted to gdb. I.e. something like this

Code: Select all

# load drivers
(gdb) cont
Continuing.
Write failed: Broken pipe

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#80 Post by bit_twiddler » Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:26 pm

I think you want to run the X server under gdb, not Furmark.
The incriminating backtrace was from the X server crashing,
not Furmark.

You might be able to attach to a running X server from gdb
from a virtual terminal or by logging in from another machine
using ssh.

When you run the X server, it has to be a version which has
been compiled with symbolic information left in the executable.
This is meta-data which the compiler generates which tells
the debugger the names of variables are defined in the program,
and where they are located when the program is run.

I'm not sure how you do this these days. In olden times, I used
to compile the X server from scratch so that I could control
options to the compiler to generate a debuggable executable.
Nowadays, you can probably just install a package which
contains the right stuff.

Best thing to do is to check with the X.org foundation:

http://www.x.org/wiki/
http://www.x.org/wiki/DeveloperStart/
http://www.x.org/wiki/Building_the_X_Window_System/

to see how to do all this. I'm sure that anyone who works on
any part of the graphics stack can tell you exactly how to do all
of this.
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#81 Post by RasmusP » Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:52 pm

bit_twiddler wrote:I think you want to run the X server under gdb, not Furmark.
The incriminating backtrace was from the X server crashing,
not Furmark.
That's what I did. If it sounded otherwise that's a bug on my part.
You might be able to attach to a running X server from gdb
from a virtual terminal or by logging in from another machine
using ssh.
I ran gdb from my X200s.
I'm not sure how you do this these days. In olden times, I used
to compile the X server from scratch so that I could control
options to the compiler to generate a debuggable executable.
Nowadays, you can probably just install a package which
contains the right stuff.
In Fedora it's easy now:

Code: Select all

debuginfo-install xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-drv-intel
What's new is that I redid the test with Fedora {19,20}. The bug may not be present in Fedora 19!

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#82 Post by bit_twiddler » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:00 pm

What's new is that I redid the test with Fedora {19,20}. The bug may not be present in Fedora 19!
This bug seems to reoccur depending upon how things are arranged in memory.
Probably some memory is getting bashed somewhere, or someone is following
a (sometimes) bad pointer.

I'm unclear about one thing though... what is the exact command that you
are using from your X200s to start the X server on your W530 under gdb?
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#83 Post by RasmusP » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:10 pm

bit_twiddler wrote:
This bug seems to reoccur depending upon how things are arranged in memory.
Probably some memory is getting bashed somewhere, or someone is following
a (sometimes) bad pointer.
And the likelihood of bad memory happening is increasing in time, I would assume. The probability of it not happening is (1-e)^t where e is the small chance of "bad memory" and t is running time (assuming independence).
I'm unclear about one thing though... what is the exact command that you
are using from your X200s to start the X server on your W530 under gdb?
I followed this guide. So
Start the server normally. Go over to your second machine and ssh into the first one. su root, and type

Code: Select all

gdb /usr/bin/Xorg $(pidof Xorg.bin)

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#84 Post by bit_twiddler » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:50 pm

So, you get the crash when you run X under gdb, but
not a backtrace? The machine reboots?
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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#85 Post by RasmusP » Sat Mar 07, 2015 9:00 pm

bit_twiddler wrote:So, you get the crash when you run X under gdb, but
not a backtrace? The machine reboots?
Exactly. No backtrace. Fedora 19 has been running for 8 hours now, so I feel pretty confident that the bug isn't there...

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#86 Post by bit_twiddler » Sat Mar 07, 2015 9:46 pm

It's probably still there but doesn't manifest itself for exactly the same
reason that it shows up in some of your test cases and not in others.

Kind of like the software bug which causes certain versions of the 747 cargo
plane to roll over on its side so gently that the crew are unaware of
the situation with dire results. It only happens every 1.5 million hours
of flight time, on average. (Boeing never found the bug...
they installed a gadget that rings a bell in the cockpit when
the condition is detected.)

If you want to be a hero, you could compile the X server with different
flags turned on and off to move things around enough in memory
so that the bug consistently manifests itself under the debugger.

Or, you could just enjoy the weather - I hear that Barcelona is a
beautiful place.
Daily Drivers: W520 i7-2760QM | W520 i7-2860QM | T420 FHD IPS i7-2640m | W701
Others: W510 | 701C (on its shrine)
Non-TP: Dell m7510
Currently Experimenting With: T420s

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#87 Post by RasmusP » Sun Mar 08, 2015 7:27 am

bit_twiddler wrote:It's probably still there but doesn't manifest itself for exactly the same
reason that it shows up in some of your test cases and not in others.
So I now ran the test for 18 hours in Fedora 19 without a reboot. I'm pretty sure the bug isn't there.
Kind of like the software bug which causes certain versions of the 747 cargo
plane to roll over on its side so gently that the crew are unaware of
the situation with dire results. It only happens every 1.5 million hours
of flight time, on average. (Boeing never found the bug...
they installed a gadget that rings a bell in the cockpit when
the condition is detected.)
Interesting. I haven't heard of this before.
If you want to be a hero, you could compile the X server with different
flags turned on and off to move things around enough in memory
so that the bug consistently manifests itself under the debugger.
Fortunately, there's only a couple of Linux version between Fedora 19 (v3.9) and 20 (v3.11) so it's easy to test if it is indeed a
Or, you could just enjoy the weather - I hear that Barcelona is a
beautiful place.
It is. But it's kind of grey today...

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#88 Post by RasmusP » Sun Mar 08, 2015 12:37 pm

Now reported on the Linux bugzilla: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94551

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Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#89 Post by bit_twiddler » Sun Mar 08, 2015 11:53 pm

Just to show how pervasive software bug are, this article lists a few
of the ones that made the media: (just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak).

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/03/19/10- ... sequences/
Daily Drivers: W520 i7-2760QM | W520 i7-2860QM | T420 FHD IPS i7-2640m | W701
Others: W510 | 701C (on its shrine)
Non-TP: Dell m7510
Currently Experimenting With: T420s

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Location: Edmonton, Canada

Re: [W530] Freezes and Random Reboots. CPU or Motherboard?

#90 Post by Tomasu » Sun Dec 20, 2015 3:24 pm

A lot of interesting information here.

I too have had a lot of issues with my W530.

the TL;DR is when I got it, the nvidia linux driver seemed to just hate me and not work properly at all, it would either not initialize the gpu, not initialize the gpu AND overheat (till the kernel did an emergency shutdown), or just overheat (It was like that for 1-2 years). Then about two years ago, things started to get unstable. It would either lock up and need to be hard reset, or it'd just reboot. In the end, the local lenovo guy replaced both my motherboard and CPU. Replacing just one of them didn't help at all. Unfortunately, it still occasionally hangs.

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