Bug 440495

Summary: gnome-terminal occasionally freezes
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Philip Spencer <pspencer>
Component: gnome-terminalAssignee: Behdad Esfahbod <behdad>
Status: CLOSED CANTFIX QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 8   
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Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2008-11-26 14:23:23 UTC Type: ---
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Description Philip Spencer 2008-04-03 19:36:18 UTC 
On random occasions, usually when I am in the middle of typing an e-mail message
using "pine", gnome-terminal will completely freeze up.

The freeze affects ALL gnome-terminal windows (including their menu bars), not
just the window into which I am typing. Gnome-terminal windows that were hidden
behind other windows will not even redraw when re-exposed.

Naturally this is a serious situation if you have dozens of shells open in
various gnome-terminal windows all performing different tasks, as killing and
restarting gnome-terminal will cause them all to be lost.

So, the last time it happened I tried to attach an strace to the gnome-terminal
process to see what it was stuck on.

To my surprise, as soon as I ran "strace -p " followed by the gnome-terminal
process id", gnome-terminal immediately unfroze and resumed normal operation.

I unfortunately did not get a chance to capture the first few system calls after
the strace, as I was so surprised to see it suddenly work. The next time it
happens I will capture the strace output in a file.

It appears gnome-terminal is blocking on some system call, which the strace
interrupted and restarted, and the restarted system call ran fine. (Perhaps it
is not even a bug in gnome-terminal but in some system library).

I will wait until the next time it happens (which may be a month or so) and post
more information then. However, I wanted to post this bug report in the meantime
in case it is happening to anyone else, so that they know about the strace
workaround.

If anyone else sees this problem, start up a different kind of terminal program
(such as xterm) -- or switch to a text console via control-alt-F1. Run ps to get
the pid of the gnome-terminal process. Then run strace -o debugfile -p pid.

This should restart gnome-terminal and if you could post the first few lines of
the debugfile created that'd be very helpful. I'll do the same when/if it next
happens to me.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

gnome-terminal-2.18.4-1.fc8

How reproducible: Random. Happens maybe once or twice a month to me.
See above.
Comment 1 Bug Zapper 2008-11-26 10:23:11 UTC 
This message is a reminder that Fedora 8 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 30 (thirty) days from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 8.  It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained.  At that time
this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 
'version' of '8'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version prior to Fedora 8's end of life.

Bug Reporter: Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that 
we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 8 is end of life.  If you 
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Comment 2 Philip Spencer 2008-11-26 14:23:23 UTC 
It has not happened again -- probably it was a bug in some external library that got fixed in some other package update.

So I'm closing it as CANTFIX -- if it happens again, I'll file a new report in F10.