Re: HAL trouble

["David H. Gutteridge" <dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost>]

On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 at 10:55:11 +0100, Jaap Boender wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Running KDE with HAL, I'm having some problems - at some point during 
>my session, the mouse will stop responding and screen updates only 
>seem to be done sporadically (I get the impression that sometimes I 
>actually have to press a key for updates to happen...)
>
>I think HAL is involved because a) disabling it seems to be a 
>workaround and b) at the point the problems occur, hal becomes 
>unkillable.
>
>Given that without HAL, things like the battery monitor do not work 
>(slightly annoying on a laptop), I'd really like to investigate this problem 
>a bit more closely.
>
>Does anyone have hints, leads or advice?
>
>best,
>
>  Jaap
>
>P.S. I'm running this: NetBSD marion-dufresne.kerguelen.org 7.99.18 
>NetBSD 7.99.18 (MARION-DUFRESNE) #3: Wed Jun  3 14:36:43 BST 2015  
>jaapb@marion-
>dufresne.kerguelen.org:/usr/obj/sys/arch/amd64/compile/MARION-
>DUFRESNE amd64
>
>with radeon drm-enabled graphics.

Hello,

I'm seeing the very same problem on 7.0_BETA on an i386 machine with
Intel graphics, running (or should I say testing) MATE. I'm also sure
HAL is the problem, because disabling it eliminates any issues for me
too.

Unfortunately, I can't really tell you how to fix it, all I can tell
you is what I've noted so far. For me, when hald gets stuck in
"tstile", not only can I not kill it (or indeed, reboot the machine
because of it), it seems to adversely affect other processes, as if
HAL's trying to say "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
For example, if I plug in a USB mouse at that point, the kernel
recognizes it, but it doesn't light up underneath indicating it's
active, and it doesn't work.

I've enabled HAL's logging feature in /etc/rc.d to output to
/var/log/messages to see if that helps. It doesn't. It doesn't log
anything before or after the freeze. Once it becomes unresponsive
and won't respond to kill -9, it doesn't log anything about that,
either. A kernel with DIAGNOSTIC, DEBUG, and LOCKDEBUG similarly
doesn't output anything useful. (After this point "top" isn't able
to show CPU states in its heading summary, either.) Of course, maybe
I'm doing something wrong here...

I can't see anything in Sergio Lenzi's recent patches that would have
any impact on the issue, either. My guess is there's some sort of
interaction issue with newer NetBSD releases. I never had this
problem on NetBSD 5 on the same machine, with HAL running as a Gnome
2 dependency.

Anyway, this is as far as I've looked into it. I haven't really had
the time of late.

Regards,

Dave