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Stubborn Intel Graphics Bug Haunts Ubuntu 12.04
jones_supa writes "The current long-term support version of Ubuntu (12.04) has been experiencing a remarkably tough-to-crack and widely affecting bug related to laptops using an Intel graphics solution. When the lid is closed, every now and then the desktop freezes and only the mouse cursor can be moved. Compiz is usually found hung in the process, switching to a VT afterwards works. The Freedesktop guys are also informed. Have Slashdotters been bitten by this bug and possibly could offer some detective work to help the OSS community find and apply the correct fix?"
I have been reporting that problem for a while, but they just assume that I am an idiot who just doesn't know how to use a computer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have this issue on my Dell mini netbook, it's one of the older ones that actually shipped with Ubuntu back in early 2010.
The problem seemed to gradually get worse for a while, and at one point the graphical start-up screen stopped working, and the thing just booted in text mode. The most egregious symptoms went away with the most recent kernel update, but it's hard to tell if the hang-on-wake problem is actually fixed, because it was intermittent anyways.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Lenovo Thinkpad x121
with Kernel 3.2.xxx one out of 10 times after opening the lid
with Kernel 3.4, 3.5 every second or third time
hopefully this issue is fixed in october with ubuntu 12.10
While their devs are busy breaking everything in sight - they ask the community to fix the bugs lol
Its not like we don't report these bugs, but the response is usually as thus:
"ATI sucks, use nividia!"
"nvidia sucks, use ATI!"
"its not our fault, they should release their sources!"
"you're doing it wrong"
and the best: "works for me!"
How about this one:
KDE 4 has issues with displaying changes made to files in Dolphin. Sometimes the changes show up fine, other times they don't and you have to refresh manually.
Oh and... "Ubuntu" because that magic word has to be inserted for Slashdots "editors" (and I use the term loosely) to care.
There! Now give me a front-page story!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
PATIENT: Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this...
DOCTOR: Well stop doing that then.
Ah, the old ones...
And this is why I use a Mac. I don't have to worry about any of that unreliable unix-y stuff and shoddy quality from Intel!
Use gnome-fallback, remove colord, disable screensavers.
Never had a problem with those settings.
Congratulations, you are a typical consumer, and have no interest in this computer nerd stuff. Bravo! (Crowd cheers.)
I was under the impression that the ubuntu community had their own channels (forums, lists, etc) for this sort of thing. Are we now the help desk for a linux distribution?
Now if ubuntu had been found to have hidden bestiality videos embedded in it somewhere, that would be news.
Come to think of it, maybe that's what the version names are about. I need to find the hidden porn involving a Hoary Hedgehog or a Precise Pangolin!
Silence is a state of mime.
Me Too, HP DV6
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Been happening on my System76 gazp7 since I got it.. I rarely have the need to put the system to sleep so I haven't spent much effort in trying the various suggestions.
It's an awful problem.
LTS release that can't reliably suspend (which means, it can't suspend) on Lenovo Thinkpads...
Ubuntu fixes this rapidly, in-stream or they cease to be credible.
Thank you Slashdot, for bringing attention to this.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
"Not a security issue, won't fix."
I've been running Ubuntu 12.04 since it was released on my laptop with an Intel video card. Have not experienced anything like this. in fact I don't think I've had any hardware related issues at all. Perhaps it only affects very specific cards? Or maybe only users with a particular set of desktop effects?
Though I have run into this problem, at least it is better than the built in driver that ships with Windows 8 and even the beta driver listed on Intel's website. I use Photoshop CS6 on a daily basis and with Windows 8, as I make color changes the picture flickers between the previous version and when the update has been applied. After saving the image and viewing it, I only come to find out that the colors I saw in Photoshop are not the ones actually saved. Real interesting is when I click Image, Color balance, I will not move any sliders, but the colors change all on their own. Disabling the use of the GPU was the only solution. I'll stick with Ubuntu and Wine and this little annoyance of the desktop freezing when closed. Though I must say I usually never put the computer into sleep mode, they are fast enough now especially with a solid state drive, just shut it down or hibernate.
When I close the lid to my laptop it shutsdown!!! We need the government to fix this now!
I have defined alias
alias killittest="pkill gnome-screensaver/gnome-screensaver-dialog"
and so far (few times) I go to terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1) and execute it. After that I switch back to graphic mode (CTRL+ALT+F7), and everything is OK, tested only few times.
I think this is giving a really bad image to Ubuntu
BR,
Ivan
It seems like Ubuntu (or maybe even all Linux) has serious issues with reinitializing hardware correctly after a suspend/reanimate. I have been bitten by this specific bug on my Lenovo. I have also, on the same machine had problems with Network Manager and/or 3g hardware which dies after a suspend. My girlfriend runs the same version of ubuntu on her MacBook, and uses a bluetooth mouse. After a suspend the whole bluetooth subsystem seems to be down (very booring for her to use the builtin touchpad with only one button in freecad...)
I get this problem on my Dell ATI laptop. If I close the lid, then the screen will go black and become completely unresponsive. I have to power cycle to get it back.
What's most annoying is that I cannot click shutdown and close the lid. If I do that then it will lock up during the shutdown process and remain on until a few hours later when I notice. Granted, it only takes a few seconds to shutdown, but it's incredibly annoying to have to babysit.
Summation 2
Nobody wants to fix bugs, especially in the Ubuntu community. They'd rather re-design the interface every 2 months to confuse everyone and create more "fun" things to do - ya know, writing new code rather than debugging someone else's code.
I write and debug Linux drivers for a living. Since this all involved open code, I could look at this problem, but it might take a few weeks (or more) of full time work, and I sure as hell wouldn't do it if I wasn't getting paid. In part, because I have almost no respect for Ubuntu any more, and I don't give a shit about the project. I might be an elitist developer in some ways, but I sure as hell wouldn't blame or belittle the non-expert user for filing bugs, because bugs are complex and very real. I'd just advise them to support a distro community which actually gives a crap about stability over features and shininess. There are less bug prone distros than Ubuntu, and not every distro shows this bug, even using the same Intel drivers.
This problem affects my Thinkpad W520 when running in Intel graphics mode. Suspend fails on lid close 9/10 times. This has motivated me to use the Nvidia graphics with the proprietary driver instead, as suspend/resume is rock solid, but at the cost of battery life.
My view is that this is only an individual symptom of a larger scale problem. It seems that there are a lot of old, verified, almost showstopper bugs that just get ignored. I'm too busy/lazy to hunt the links at this point, but for example GNOME3 has probably from the beginning had a bug that it gets very sluggish after a few days, at least on some GPU's/drivers, the kernel's trashing behavior in out-of-memory situations is horrible, the audio stack is a horrible mess etc.
It's probably a wider problem of QA, that may be very difficult to solve. At least as a programmer I'm first to admit that I don't want to use my spare time fixing bugs. Debian's almost draconian policies seem to do quite well in terms of stability, but the desktop often lags behind (this may be unavoidable) and the desktop doesn't seem to be a very high priority for them.
PS. This post in no way suggests that things are better, or aren't a lot worse, in Windows-world and OS X with the controlled hardware platform is a very different situation. Maybe I should check if the grass is really greener in the BSD-side.
I saw similar behavior the other day under different circumstances with a much older version of Linux. OpenSUSE 10.2, had a YouTube video playing and plugged in a Logitech USB headset (which I've never done before). Mouse pointer would move, but windows would not respond. Would not respond to key presses. Could not ssh into the computer. May be a different trigger for the same weird state.
It's a crap shoot. Sometimes you open the lid and it lights up like normal, some times it emits black light (the screen is on, but blank/black).
You can usually see the mouse cursor, and a couple times I was able to get it to change from the regular pointer to the hand for selecting a button or repositioning a window but it doesn't matter how much you click or what key combinations (pull up terminal, log off quick keys, etc) nothing changes that black screen with a cursor on it.
Hope there's a fix in the works. Until then save your work before closing the lid.
Have had Ubuntu 12.04 on my Acer laptop since late April, and I haven't come across this bug once yet. Altho, I never close my laptop without suspending it first, so maybe that's an easy workaround for anyone who's affected.
On an Acer Aspire 5313. I've been dealing with it simply by doing as the summary suggests: switching to VT and restarting lighttdm. I'd be happy to help any way I can. The problem doesn't seem to happen every time it suspends, but it happens enough to be annoying. Mostly I just use that laptop for browsing the web so it's no big deal, but I can see it being a major issue if somebody was, for example, working on an important document and hadn't saved.
Even though the machine was new from a Ubuntu mfg, it randomly hangs. In this case there is no console available and the machine isnt pingable. Happens with the lid open or closed. Sometimea happens a few times a day, Sometimes happens after 3 days. It waa a major purchase for him as well; it cost half what he makes in a month. Now I dont know if I gave him good advice or not. Of course I've heard horror stories about major mfgs as well (yes even Macs) so it happens to all of them.
My only problem with closing the lid is that I have to restart my network services to regain internet access (doesn't reconnect automatically after opening the lid).
it happens to me too...
lenovo desktop with ubuntu 12.04 clean install
it happens randomly...
Flame on!
When this happens I start a VT and kill gnome-session. This ALWAYS gets me back to a GUI Login screen...
You didn't really need to switch to Fedora over that. What I did when Unity got on my nerves was sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
I have this problem on my laptop. It only started for me when I upgraded to 12.04 LTS. Ubuntu 11.10 worked like a charm, without this bug.
So if I am experiencing the same bug as the one this topic is about, then I guess it's to do with a new version of Compiz or X.org or whatever between 11.10 and 12.04. It's not a big issue for me - I use the laptop only to browse the web so I don't mind restarting when the bug appears. I'd be a lot more pissed if it happened on my desktop (productivity) machine. I would probably be driven to move distros.
I'm glad to know it isn't just me. I have an Asus Netbook with integrated Intel video. It happens about 1/3 of the time I suspend. I accidentally figured out I could switch to console VT and kill Xorg. I'll look for the bug on Launchpad and add my $.02.
Some settling may occur during posting.
I'm using nvidia graphics on a desktop system and also get regular freezing where only the mouse cursor moves, no idea if it's related or if this is just how Ubuntu unity gets sometimes...
I am not convinced that this is just a linux problem. I have a laptop with a Intel HD Graphics adapter (8086:01116) running Window 7 pro, that experiences similar behavior when coming out of suspend. Some times the screen freezes and the mouse moves, other times the mouse freezes but the screen continues to update (for instance alt-tab navigates windows that still respond to the keyboard).
.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/966744/comments/258
I have Intel integrated graphics and I had similar problems, but following line into grub.conf at the end of kernel line fixed it: pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1
it's not exactly hard to get good hardware which runs Linux excellently already.
This is true if you are in a position to discard old hardware and buy new hardware, not so much if you are trying to reuse an existing PC. Or are used computer stores where you live familiar with Linux?
There's an issue with network lockups first reported in 2007 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/132042. People have been adding comments ever since, but it hasn't been even been assigned yet.
I guess part of the difference is the philosophy behind the inclusion criteria. Unlike Debian legal, Fedora legal has made the decision to exclude console emulators on grounds that the non-infringing uses (namely to run homebrew applications) are not substantial enough to overcome the risk of a lawsuit from Nintendo.
http://windows.microsoft.com/
Mac is UNIX bro
But not X11. Mac OS X applications use Quartz instead.
When you say you're disabled, I can only assume you're referring to your sense of humour?
It could very well be a side effect. Asperger syndrome is among the disabilities that make it hard to distinguish sarcasm from sincerity.
PATIENT: Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this...
DOCTOR: Well stop doing that then.
PATIENT: It hurts even more when I don't do this because if I don't, I can't perform the duties of my job, I'll get fired, and then I'll have no food to eat.
Also send a copy of the relevant hardware, and the source code to every installed package, with history dating to before the problem started happening so you can bisect the error.
Or you could use your psychic powers to flip the appropriate bits in memory when this bug comes up.
Computers are fiendishly complicated. Sometimes there's no simple answer to a problem, and the problem ends up on slashdot as a result. Personally I'm just glad [a] I don't have this problem (debian stable), and [b] it's not my job to fix it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
After reading nearly all the posts in this thread, it seems obvious to me, we all agree: If you want something that works, don't go Linux (at least not Ubuntu)
When I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 I ran into exactly this problem. It was a total pain. I looked around the Ubuntu forums, but found very little of anything helpful. I also looked at the Dell Mini 10v forums (as this is the affected computer), but again found nothing. While doing this though, I got increasingly annoyed with both the freezes and the Unity desk top. So, I installed KDE. What do you know, I no longer see the damn bug and I have a desktop that is much more suited to my needs. If you are having this problem, it might be worth giving it a try. Easy to follow instruction can be found at http://blog.sudobits.com/2012/04/14/how-to-install-kde-desktop-on-ubuntu-12-04/.
Developers for both Unity and Gnome3 seem to be more autistic than rainman himself when it comes to user acceptance and usability. Shitfits have been tried and didn't even get a reaction other than "I don't see your problem. Until the very last user leaves gnome and Ubuntu, Unity and the gnome3 shell will be the default for those.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I've had no problems with 12.04, but 12.10 is extremely buggy. Compiz crashes within seconds of a normal login. This is in VMWare Player 9. Windows 8 Release Preview works flawlessly by comparison.
From another direction.
I have little experience with Ubuntu (or linux, for that matter), but I noticed a common thread that nobody else seems to have discussed in detail--the fact that there is a lid being closed is part of the problem. Perhaps it isn't a software issue, but rather a mechanical issue dressed up for the dance?
Example. My friend is complaining over Ventrilo for days that his laser mouse freaks out for no apparent reason, but works fine on his other computer. He assumes his drivers are bad ("Fucking MS drivers!") and starts trying drivers one at a time. I asked him if he had cleaned his mouse-pad recently. "No", he says but then follows it with a "What the fuck?". Seems he had some glitter from something embedded in his mouse-pad--the glitter was refracting the laser from the mouse and fucking with it. He was using a different mouse-pad when he tested it on other computers.
Perhaps there is some weird inductive loop between the monitor and the touch-pad? What else happens, in terms of circuitry, when the lid is closed? Are any switches, even presumably un-related ones, being opened/closed when the lid is closed? What do those switches control? Is there a sleep timer involved, and if so, is it keyed to something else that goes to sleep (not good, as nobody is awake to wake the rest of the crew when the fire starts)?
Just tryin to throw some odd-angled curveballs. Who knows, might shake something loose.
in my BIOS I was able to switch from s3 to s1, I didn't like it as much but it fixed my problem
On a hp dv6 series with a first generation i5
Ubuntu bug.
I have the same issue on a Dell laptop with Nvidia card.
Several times per week I can not bring it out of "locked" monitor when the monitors have gone to sleep.
Many eyes make all bugs ... HAHAHA, sorry, I couldn't finish that sentence with a straight face.
It is not the only major gfx bug. 12.04 has not worked since May with Nvidia and Xen. 11.10 works, except just last week they shipped a kernel that crashes Xen again. Last time it was broken from April till July. Xen/ATI doesn't seem to work either.
A closely related bug has kept me on on stuck Kubuntu 10.04. If I try to run an external monitor on my latptop with any variant of *ubuntu from 11.x on - or recent versions of Fedora for that matter - it freezes up.
Every time I log on it asks me to upgrade to 12.04 now. I would dearly love to, but it would render my laptop effectively unusable.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
We arent dumb bosses, no need for the retard talk.
Oh, and its obviously not much of a solution or this wouldnt be a story.
on this pos netbook. Twas a pure unity problem,, gnome 3 rolled on just fine..
there were a couple of panel additions that I consider mandatory that I couldn't find - most importantly hierarchical menu-based file browsing
Panel > Add New Items > Directory Menu
Perhaps the problem was simply that I'm still running 10.04 because I'm unwilling to deal with Unity's idiot-friendly interface.
I don't know about 10.04; I put up with Unity during 11.04 and switched to Xubuntu in the 11.10 cycle.
I tried KDE as well - I believe my problem there was that the screen corners are "numb", all panel buttons start one pixel away where they require attention to click
Windows 2000 had the same problem. Xfce doesn't; clicking in both corners of my top panel activates something.
I've been putting up with this minor annoyance for a while on my Toshiba Satellite. When I open the lid and find just the mouse cursor on an otherwise blank screen, I hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE and then type in my password to login again.
What an hour for my remaining mod points to expire. +Informative on this. It's different from (but serves the same purposes as) ifconfig and iwconfig, and it's different (although has a slight feature overlap) from ipconfig on Windows, but netsh is very much oriented at users like the GP of this post. To a complete newbie, it's confusing and a bit scary; to somebody who is comfortable with the command line and/or likes to use scripts to automate system administration, it's excellent.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
As much as I like wobly windows and what not, I try to stray away from CCSM. (yep, same probably here using macbook with intel gfx)
Using xfce 4.10 with no issues on 12.04 with no CCSM with xfce compisiting turned on.
I see this bug regularly on my Thinkpad X220 laptop running Ubuntu 12.04. Is there a tracking bug on Launchpad or in the Freedesktop bugzilla?
Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
Asus M70VN-XS, same problems, X froze up, had to start another X session to get some functionality back, regardless of what I tried, couldn't get application icons back, was able to eventually get the taskbar restarted, etc.
After a ton of google searches, gave up (only was using distro to get latest btrfs capabilities and kernel), and returned to debian.
But...made the mistake of installing debian stable (wheezy) instead of testing, then for some unexplained reason, every time I tried installing testing I ended up with stable again.
And no, I'm not a Debian (or ubuntu) newbie. Have been using Debian since potato on laptops, desktops and internet serving servers (bind, apache, sshd, etc.). And ubuntu since it first came out as well.
You don't have to shut the lid. Just let it sit, and all of a sudden, it will lock up. It doesn't seem to happen when I'm using my docking station.
--- wad
That machine was on Ubuntu-11 (Gibbering Gibbon or Masturbating Macaque, I can't bear to remember) with the standard desktop in place instead of the heap of shit that came in with the downgrade from 10 to 11.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Dude, just stop. I have reported many critical Ubuntu bugs to Launchpad--I'm talking about stupid bugs that should never have happened, should never have been released, could quickly be fixed or reverted--but no one at Ubuntu is responsible for fixing them, or for taking the lead on getting the right people to fix it, so nothing happens. That, or 6 months after you report it, a bot says, "Thank you for helping Ubuntu by reporting this bug. Please test the latest version of the software to see if the bug still exists." You confirm it, and 6 months later, same thing. Meanwhile, no actual effort has been expended to investigate or fix the bug. It's like a slap in the face to the bug reporter: it's saying that his time is worthless, when he's already spent time dealing with and reporting the bug.
So get off your high horse. There are plenty of people like me who do exactly that: we file bugs, we complain when they are ignored, we complain when they are not fixed, we complain when stupid regressions appear, we complain when boneheaded decisions are made to release buggy garbage that shouldn't have seen the light of packages.ubuntu.com--but Ubuntu does what it wants to do. New and shiny is more important than stable and reliable and consistent--even for a Long Term Support release, big fat ugly smelly bugs go ignored, and pleas to release the blatantly obvious fix fall on deaf ears.
If it wasn't for dpkg and apt, I'd gladly try another distro. One of these days I'll probably go back to Debian, where at least packages have maintainers who are supposed to be responsible for them, and bug reporters don't get told to test unchanged software over and over again.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Create a file /etc/pm/sleep.d/20_custom_ehci_hcd containing:
#!/bin/sh /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/unbind /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/unbind ;; /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/bind /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ehci_hcd/bind ;;
# File: "/etc/pm/sleep.d/20_custom-ehci_hcd".
case "${1}" in
hibernate|suspend)
# Unbind ehci_hcd for first device 0000:00:1a.0:
echo -n "0000:00:1a.0" | tee
# Unbind ehci_hcd for second device 0000:00:1d.0:
echo -n "0000:00:1d.0" | tee
resume|thaw)
# Bind ehci_hcd for first device 0000:00:1a.0:
echo -n "0000:00:1a.0" | tee
# Bind ehci_hcd for second device 0000:00:1d.0:
echo -n "0000:00:1d.0" | tee
esac
A fix has now been released for Quantal (12.10), they are working on releasing the fix for Precise (12.04) as an update, until then there is a PPA with the fix from Timo Aaltonen at https://launchpad.net/~tjaalton/+archive/ppa until the official Precise xserver-xorg-video-intel package is updated.