Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 69280
gnomeicu can cause total system freeze, seemingly when messages cross paths
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:44:18 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510 Description of problem: Running gnomeicu and connected to the icq network. I have a friend on and we send messages back and forth. Fairly often, I will hit enter to send a message and that's the last my machine is heard from. Mouse stops moving, ctrl-alt-backspace no longer exits X windows, can't jump to other console windows, ctrl-alt-del does nothing, machine seems to become a brick. My theory currently is that a send from me and a send from my friend cross paths and gnomeicu freaks out and performs some operation that entirely brings down Linux. Has happened both on athlon architecture and on p3 (i686). This seemed to happen with the original version of GnomeICU so I went and got the latest (0.98.2). It definitely happens with that, pretty repeatably. I am submitting it as a RedHat bug because it takes down the entire operating system, which a simple error in an app should not be able to do. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. run gnomeicu 2. login to icq network with valid user id. 3. start chatting with a friend. 4. send messages back and forth with friend (friend should send simultaneously also) as fast as possible. 5. usually that will shortly lead to this crash. Actual Results: machine totally freezes up. no key combos have effect, mouse does not move. hard reset is only way to wake machine up again. happens on two different machines (two different architectures also--athlon and P3), both with redhat 7.2, kernel 2.4.9-34. happened on earlier versions of 2.4 kernel also. both machines are reasonably current 1 ghz boxes with nvidia graphics cards (one has riva tnt 2, other geforce 3 ultra pro). both have sound blaster live sound card, but this behavior doesn't happen with other apps that use the sound card (like yahoo messenger or gaim). Expected Results: messages should be received on both sides with no freeze, regardless of rate or timing of the sends. Additional info: i've seen nothing appear in any logs after this freeze occurs. i've repeatedly run up2date to ensure that both machines have the latest. this hasn't helped yet. keep in mind that i am using gnomeicu 0.98.2, but i think it happened with the shipped version of gnomeicu also. regardless, if any user mode app can take down the whole system, that's an item of grave concern.
Has to be a kernel issue if a non-root app can lock the system.
you're not running the nvidia binary only kernel drivers are you ?
i'm running the nvidia drivers which i've compiled specifically for the current kernel. i don't use their prepackaged binaries.
it turns out this was a symptom of the sound driver being messed up. there was no cure besides installing a newer kernel. i believe the defective sound support was in 2.4.9-34, an errata kernel. other IM apps were behaving the same way. sorry i didn't figure this out sooner and also that i lost track of the bug report for a bit.