[SUMMARY] Problem with Xsun locking up and hanging display

From: Michael Steeves (msteeves@bbn.com)
Date: Mon Jan 31 2000 - 11:10:23 CST


Sorry for the delay in getting back to everyone with a summary-- took
some time to get some leads (a few people had this problem, not many
had answers), and to get things taken care of. Also, apologies in
advance for the length of this mail. The original problem:

> I've got a couple of workstations (Ultra 5 and Sparc 5) that seem to
> randomly lock up the display-- you can move the mouse around, but not
> select anything, and the keyboard doesn't work (although L1-A does
> work). It appears that this is caused by excessive window
> manipulations (moving a window around a lot, scrolling and selecting
> text simultaneously), but it's not consistently reproducable.
>
> The Ultra-5 should be pretty much up-to-date with Sun patches (ran
> Casper Dik's patching script a couple of weeks ago), and the Sparc 5
> got a patch cluster from Sun from right before Y2K (late
> November/early December).
>
> The system is still usable-- I can telnet into the system, and do all
> the usual stuff on the system (process listing, etc.). The Xsun
> process seems to be the culprit-- it's showing up in /usr/ucb/ps as
> eating up a lot of resources (CPU mostly, I think, but I don't have a
> listing handy....). I've gcored the file, but don't get much useful
> from that with gdb:
> (gdb) where
> #0 0xeefcbfe4 in m64PolyFillRect1Rect ()
> #1 0xef49eb2c in miSpritePolyFillRect ()
> #2 0x27dc4 in ProcPolyFillRectangle ()
> #3 0x24174 in Dispatch ()
> #4 0x3d278 in main ()
>
> If I kill off the Xsun process, the user gets booted back to the CDE
> login (or the console login on one system, since the user stopped the
> desktop login screen via the dtlogin command), and can then log in
> normally, and begin working again. The Sparc 5 user uses OpenWindows,
> and the Ultra-5 user (me) uses FVWM2.

As a bit of follow-up, here's something I got from the user detailing
steps to reproduce the problem he was having:
>> If you want to replicate this yourself,
>>
>> 1. install star-office
>> 2. open a few page long 'doc' msword file.
>> 3. hold down left-mouse and drag (to select) off the bottom of the screen
>> 4. watch it scroll a few times and then hang.
>> 5. reboot
>>
>> 2-3-4 might take as long as a minute
>>
>> 1 and 5 take long time :-)

The responses I got were from Tina Yutian Lei <TLei@Vanc.EGGHEAD.com>:
> I had same problem until I installed the latest patch. Make sure you
> have patch 105284-31, 105362-24 and 105633-29 installed. Hope this
> help.

and from Michael Miller <Michael.Miller@oyster.co.uk>:
> I've seen this problem. Have you applied the PGX patches?
>
> for our ultra5 in question I applied patch 105362-26 (PGX 2.6: M64
> Graphics Patch). The problem seemed to go away after this patch was
> applied.

I went with Tina's answer, since it would also include Michael
Miller's answer. After installing the patches and rebooting the
user's system, the user reports that he can pull up Star Office and
perform his little test with a 55 page document, and not have any
hanging issues.

-Mike

-- 
Michael Steeves (msteeves@bbn.com)	| voice: 781-262-7731
Unix System Administrator		| pager: 800-759-8888 (3762616)
GTE Internetworking			| 	 3762616@SKYTEL.COM
GTE Internetworking; powered by BBN	| fax:   781-998-1553



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