GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 665650
Hang when a VMware window is open (NVidia proprietary driver)
Last modified: 2017-11-01 18:56:49 UTC
Kernel: linux-3.1.4-gentoo Gnome version: 3.2.1 Video card: Nvidia GTX 560 Ti Drivers: 290.10 Overview: Gnome-shell occasionally hangs when using vmware player (3 and 4). The cursor is still movable (and correctly seems change depending on context). The audio also appears to behave normally. Other graphics on the screen do not change. This does not happen in Fallback mode. (might be a HW acceleration issue then?) Reproducing (my common case): 1. Open vmware player and load a Windows 7 guest 2. Have HW graphics acceleration enabled. 3. Load a game (my case: Civilization V) 4. Play for some time while exercising gnome-shell features such as clicking the Activities menu and switching workspaces. This will cause gnome-shell to hang eventually. Apparently Ubuntu users face the same issue with a higher chance of hanging than I: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/869408
Hm, even if you tried to make the title clear, I still got it wrong at first. Attempting to make this clearer... ;-) Second, the Ubuntu bug report shows this only happens with NVidia proprietary drivers. Could you attach your ~/.xsession-errors after the hang happens (switch to a console using Ctrl+Alt+F2)? Does killing the Shell fix the problem ('killall -9 gnome-shell')?
Created attachment 203046 [details] xsession-errors log From right after gnome-shell hangs.
To answer your question: yes, killing gnome-shell does fix the problem. Good to know, I've just been killing X this whole time (inconvenient, to say the least.) :)
Comment on attachment 203046 [details] xsession-errors log There's this: (gnome-shell:3692): Clutter-WARNING **: The actor 'uiGroup' is currently inside an allocation cycle; calling clutter_actor_queue_relayout() is not recommended Devs, is this of any help?
I have been experiencing these lock ups quite regularly. Mostly I can get away with just restarting gnome-shell, but occasionally I have to restart X. I am using Ubuntu 11.10 with nvidia proprietary drivers.
Looks like Gnome bug 667865 is a duplicate which is now what the Ubuntu bug is assigned to. It also appears it's not NVIDIA proprietary specific as comments there include Nouveau, as well as ATI and Intel users. It appears to be an issue with either gnome-shell or VMware (both Player and Workstation users have reported issues). I've experienced this problem the last several months with Fedora 16 and NVIDIA proprietary over several kernel, gnome-shell, NVIDIA, and VMware player versions. It's to the point I've bound a keystroke to a script to kill/restart gnome-shell which usually works (where "Alt+R,r" doesn't), but rarely it requires switching console and manually killing it, killing X, or even a hard reboot.
I collected a backtrace from when the shell freezes, I believe VMWARE is causing this, buts its quite intermittent so hard to say 100% for sure.
+ Trace 230114
I believe , disable automatically grab and ungrab the mouse cursor ,then gnome3 is normal .And enbale it ,the gnome3 well broken after some time.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 667865 ***