Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I have installed Ubuntu Mate (15.4) on an x61 along side with W7. Everything went very smooth, all hardware was detected properly. The only problem is that the systems just freezes from time to time and the only thing I can do is force shutdown (with power button). The windows is working fine and stable.
Was wondering if someone is familiar with this issue. And if the problem is in the linux version which alternative would be better for my machine?

Here are the key specs that might matter:

CPU - core 2 duo (T9300) 2.5GHz
Ram - 8GB crucial
SSD - 250GB Samsung 850 Pro
Screen - SXGA+ mod
WiFi - intel 6300

It also has an itergrated touchpad mod and webcam mod. Both worked fine out of the box.

What does journalctl say? if anything?

vavet wrote:Hi,
I have installed Ubuntu Mate (15.4) on an x61 along side with W7. Everything went very smooth, all hardware was detected properly. The only problem is that the systems just freezes from time to time and the only thing I can do is force shutdown (with power button). The windows is working fine and stable.
Was wondering if someone is familiar with this issue. And if the problem is in the linux version which alternative would be better for my machine?

Yes, it's a known problem. Intel 965 support was broken sometime after 3.17. The kernel driver eventually deadlocks the GPU solid. The bug is apparently fixed in the 4.x series.

xiphmont wrote: Yes, it's a known problem. Intel 965 support was broken sometime after 3.17. The kernel driver eventually deadlocks the GPU solid. The bug is apparently fixed in the 4.x series.

So does it mean there is no way to run a stable linux on x61?

vavet wrote:

xiphmont wrote: Yes, it's a known problem. Intel 965 support was broken sometime after 3.17. The kernel driver eventually deadlocks the GPU solid. The bug is apparently fixed in the 4.x series.

So does it mean there is no way to run a stable linux on x61?

No, it means avoid Linux kernels 3.18 through (but not including) 4.0, or run graphics without GPU acceleration. Most modern distros are on 4.x already, so the problem is fixed there already.

xiphmont wrote:Yes, it's a known problem. Intel 965 support was broken sometime after 3.17. The kernel driver eventually deadlocks the GPU solid. The bug is apparently fixed in the 4.x series.

I must have been very lucky then, never seen 1 freeze on 3 X61 units running those kernels.

Dekks wrote:

xiphmont wrote:Yes, it's a known problem. Intel 965 support was broken sometime after 3.17. The kernel driver eventually deadlocks the GPU solid. The bug is apparently fixed in the 4.x series.

I must have been very lucky then, never seen 1 freeze on 3 X61 units running those kernels.

Could be, or you have backported fixes, or you never used any of the relevant GPU rendering codepaths. All my X61 tablets could be frozen reliably by the F21 installer. It wasn't a phantom problem. IIRC, it had something to do with accidentally mishandling a specific GPU exception after a large code cleanup in the driver. It took folks a while to sort out what was going on as the exception had always been mishandled, but before it had been mishandled in a different way that didn't deadlock things

I do remember this bug as well, so I'm glad it is fixed. Update your kernel.

sudo apt update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

That won't quite do it I think. I actually checked yesterday for something unrelated (a ~2 minute boot time due to some acpid thing, I believe. Kernel 4.0 didn't solve it but I heard downgrading to 14.04 will)
The current (latest) Ubuntu doesn't include 4.0 yet, but you can install it if you want like this:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-to-I ... 8288.shtml

upgraded the kernel to 4.0.4 version. Seem to be fine now. Thanks for the hints!

If you run out of ram and have no swap space set up you can provoke similar behavior by doing something ram-intensive. (My x21 was crashing in this way the other day when watching youtube videos in a browser - they did run in smtube/mplayer at 360p).

jaspen-meyer wrote:If you run out of ram and have no swap space set up you can provoke similar behavior by doing something ram-intensive. (My x21 was crashing in this way the other day when watching youtube videos in a browser - they did run in smtube/mplayer at 360p).

no RAm + no swap could generate any number of fail modes dependant on what software/hardware was upto. GPU lock ups are just one possibility.