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IDProjectCategoryView StatusLast Update
0006747ardourbugspublic2016-01-28 16:32
Reporterunfa Assigned To 
PriorityurgentSeveritycrashReproducibilityrandom
Status newResolutionopen 
PlatformGNU/LinuxOSKX Studio 14.04 
Summary0006747: Ardour causes X server to crash
DescriptionThis is something I experience repeatedly recently.

From time to time some actions in the GUI seem to start causing the whole graphical environment to crash (all applications are terminated and I need to log in again).

For example in one version of Ardour, adding a plugin from Favourites in the editor's mixer strip triggered X server crash. I restored my system from backup to use older version:

Ardour 4.4.143
"Discreet Music"
(built from revision 4.4-143-g8ab69cb)
Intel 64 bit

And for some time it worked fine, but now I crashed my X server a dozen times by simply selecting a track's header in the editor. Maybe it has something to do with plug-ins? I'm using a lot of Calf plugins from Git and I updated them anyway, not expecting any trouble. Maybe I need to revert them to older version to see if they cause the trouble?
TagsNo tags attached.

Activities

mhartzel

2016-01-23 11:17

reporter   ~0017824

I'm not a Ardour developer, just a user like you, but I wanted to comment here because this problem sounds familiar.

Are you aware that there are serious problems in the Intel Graphics driver that affects new Intel chipsets with Intel HD graphics ? I bought a new laptop for Ardour work in the summer of 2015, I think the chipset is Baytrail, and I had constant graphics related crashes when using Linux on it. So far the new machine is gathering dust waiting for the bugfixes. I tried kernels 4.0 - 4.2, but problems only get worse with newer kernels. There is some hope that kernel 4.4 fixes these issues, but I haven't tested it yet.

The symptoms are: You can throw heavy loads on the machine like compiling Gentoo from source 10 hours in a row and the machine won't crash. It only crashes when you do something graphics driver related like open up a new window, click on a item on window, switch to a new desktop or scroll a window.

mhartzel

2016-01-28 16:32

reporter   ~0017855

If your crashing problem is caused by the thing I described in the comment above, then here is some additional information I found that may help you to work around the problem.

This problem was first published here a year ago: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88012

People have now tried all kinds of workarounds and it seems the problem is not caused by the Intel HD graphics driver after all. The culprit is Intel processor C States. These a power saving states where the processor shuts down parts of the processor circuitry or lowers their voltage to save battery power. This can happen several times in a second during normal operation. Sometimes when the processor is either sleeping or waking up parts of it's circuitry something unknown happens which makes the processor or graphics chip to crash.

Many people have got rid of the crashes by disabling processor C States with this kernel boot option: intel_idle.max_cstate=1

Discussion about the problem is here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051

It seems that this problem affects Baytrail and some newer Intel chipsets.

Issue History

Date Modified Username Field Change
2016-01-22 11:24 unfa New Issue
2016-01-23 11:17 mhartzel Note Added: 0017824
2016-01-28 16:32 mhartzel Note Added: 0017855