GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 665565
Gnome-shell crashes regularly with proprietary nvidia driver and twin view enabled
Last modified: 2012-03-24 11:23:07 UTC
Hello, I've repeatedly been getting crashing on gnome shell that apparently gnome shell can't recover from. I occasionally also see what looks like a crash on my laptop which is also running gnome shell 3.0 from debian testing, but that's running on an intel chipset with a free driver, and when that brief crash occurs the shell seems to be able to recover itself okay. However, in gnome shell on my desktop I get crashing very regularly, and when it tries to recover it looks like it's putting everything back, then suddenly it seems to crash again or give up and then one of the screens goes completely black. On this black screen is a message telling me that it couldn't recover and unfortunately I have to log out and back in again. I've been trying to figure out why this happens; it can happen as often as once every hour. As best as I can tell this is probably due to the proprietary driver with twinview enabled (I have a dual monitor setup on my desktop). I am not completely sure, but that seems to be the only link between this and other threads where people are having similar complaints on forums. http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=264331 Thanks!
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. Without a stack trace from the crash it's very hard to determine what caused it. Can you get us a stack trace? Please see http://live.gnome.org/GettingTraces for more information on how to do so. Thanks in advance! See gnome-shell specific info on running under gdb at https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Debugging.
Thanks, I will try to do that. I am currently unable to `apt-get -b source gnome-shell` however: /usr/include/gtk-3.0/gdk/gdkdevice.h:159:1: error: unknown type name G_CONST_RETURN I have the appropriate dependencies installed I think, so don't know what the cause of that is. However I suppose that's a diversion from this bug. I'll try to see if I can get a version compiled from source with the debugging symbols enabled not-via-debian and will report back here when I have more info, I suppose!
Get the debug info packages from you distro. Here's how for debian or fedora: http://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/StackTraces
Unfortunately there is presently no gnome-shell-dbg package for debian (in testing, at least), and my attempt to build a package with debugging symbols was by following that guide and trying to build the package with apt-get -b source, which is the method suggested if such a package is not provided. I'll try to figure this out by building from source with debugging symbols and run that, or hopefully when the next version hits debian testing it won't have this same compilation error (which could be PEBKAC...)
By the way, I realize I'm still pretty lame on this bug, but I can provide one extra bit of information: I got nouveau drivers to work on this machine, and I'm still experiencing the unrecoverable crashes, so this bug's title is somewhat misleading. Still experiencing this problem though.
It could be a different crash, keep in mind.
cwebber, ping, were you able to find debug package and collect stacktrace of crash ?
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!