Re: Gnome 3.2 freezes, then goes 100% CPU

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le lundi 05 décembre 2011 à 06:01 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams a écrit :
> On Mon, 2011-12-05 at 11:46 +0100, thiebault artenum com wrote:
> > Hi Gnome list,
> > I posted a question on Fedora forum (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=273532), 
> > but I thought it was maybe more Gnome-related than Fedora-related, so I will ask it here too.
> > I have installed F16 this week-end on my MacBook Pro 3,1 and since this morning, after a few 
> > minutes of usage, the whole GUI freezes.
> > When I type Alt-F3, I can log-in in text mode and I see that gnome-shell is at 100% CPU usage.
> 
> I occasionally see gnome-shell spinning at 100% upon login - the desktop
> visually starts, but is unresponsive.  I've not had gnome-shell go into
> a spin once everything is up-and-running.  strace shows that it is
> waiting on some futex but I haven't figured out the root cause yet.
> 
> > I also sometimes see in this prompt view a message indicating that the core temperature 
> > has exceeded threshold.
> > I installed GKrellM to watch the temperatures and they seem quite reasonable (the graphic 
> > card, at the highest temperature is currently displaying 76°C).
> > Where does Gnome 3 report these kind of problems (I have seen no error meesage in the
> >  ~/.xsession-errors file) ?
> 
> This is a separate issue.  Things like temp reading come from sensors /
> lm-sensors.  I'd wonder if these even work on a Mac.  The sensors code
> can be pretty wildly inaccurate depending upon the sanity of the
> hardware;  there is lots of vendor-specific-implementation stuff
> involved in reading the sensor values.  [although it seems to work well
> on my Toshiba DV7-3085DX].
I don't think the problem is temperature here: it's CPU usage. ;-)

So, as Adam said, you can run the Shell in strace to see what happens,
or play with gdb (if you interrupt the Shell using Ctrl+C from gdb, and
run 'ba', you will get an idea of where it's currently working). See
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Debugging

And please file a bug, that's the best way of debugging this.