[Mageia-discuss] MGA2: Gnome session & system freeze issues

[Wolfgang Bornath]

MGA2 x86_64, Gnome
Nvidia graphics, latest proprietary driver from the MGA non-free repo
All updates.

1. Gnome starts new session out of the blue

Today I was editing a document in gedit. Other open applications were
chromium-browser and gkrellm. Suddenly out of the blue in the middle
of writing a word the screen changed to a new session, screen with GDM
showing). Logging in again no application was saved, work lost as well
as 2 tabs in the browser where I did not save the URLs yet. syslog
shows a Gnome session I/O failure before the session switch:

 - Jul  6 07:28:49 marvin-1 gnome-session[2301]: Gdk-WARNING:
gnome-session: Fatal IO error 11 (ressource temporarily not available)
on X server :0.

After session restart a long list of "DEBUG" messages followed. No
errors reported in that list.


2. Occasional system deep freeze

Starting some time ago and occurring last time yesterday I get a deep
freeze (only SysRq keys for forced reboot working). Inquiring I found
this message in syslog:

 - Jul  5 13:27:42 marvin-1 kernel: [10565.322087] NVRM: GPU at
0000:01:00.0 has fallen off the bus.

man-draker in the German forum pointed me to
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-rhel-fedora-linux-nvidia-nvrm-gpu-fallen-off-bus/
which talks about persistence mode of nvidia-smi. The persistence mode
is disabled by default. Switched it to "enabled" but I am not sure if
this is the true culprit - the same error should have come up more
often and on other people's machines as well if this setting was the
culprit, right?

Another idea was offered by doktor5000:
"It could be some malfunction of systemd and you could ask Colin about it". :)

Additional information: the freeze is not caused by faulty memory, I
let memtest run over nicht for 8 hours, no errors.