Solving system-lockups locally

[smolloy]

Lately I have been experiencing quite frequent lockups of my system (my fault for being so bleeding-edge!). Typically, the system would become almost completely unresponsive -- the mouse would move, but I could not click on anything, and the cursor wouldn't change on hover-over, and the keyboard would not work (not even the Caps light would come on).

My first response was to hard-reboot the system, which wasn't very clever, and shows that I still solve some problems like a Windows user. My second response was to ssh in from another computer on my network, and kill whatever process had locked up. This strikes me as a much more linux-like solution!

I have two questions:
1/ Does my second response (and my pride at coming up with it) get me any geek-points?
2/ Is there a way to solve this problem from the local machine -- i.e. without having to log on remotely from another computer?

Thanks.

[Freston]

1/ Does my second response (and my pride at coming up with it) get me any geek-points?

Perhaps six or seven. You can double that if your locked up system is a P5 4.5 Ghz Quatro core ultra uber deluxe *bling*, and the system that saves it is a 386 and you use tha LPT1 port to establish connection.

2/ Is there a way to solve this problem from the local machine -- i.e. without having to log on remotely from another computer?

No! It's locked.

If there is remotely a way to get a locked system back into runlevel 3 I would be much more than interested in hearing it however.

[smolloy]

Perhaps six or seven. You can double that if your locked up system is a P5 4.5 Ghz Quatro core ultra uber deluxe *bling*, and the system that saves it is a 386 and you use tha LPT1 port to establish connection.

No! It's locked.

If there is remotely a way to get a locked system back into runlevel 3 I would be much more than interested in hearing it however.

Can't you just ssh in, and drop to runlevel 3?

[anomie]

How are you identifying which process is 'locked'? By high cpu usage?

What's the process that is causing you trouble? (And what distro/version is this? The one in your sig?)

[smolloy]

How are you identifying which process is 'locked'? By high cpu usage?

What's the process that is causing you trouble?

Basically, yes. I had a suspicion that beryl was locking up, and that was confirmed when I saw it using ~50% of my cpu (an entire core!!). I killed it from the ssh session, and the local machine became responsive again.

(And what distro/version is this? The one in your sig?)

I'm using a modified version of Sabayon 3.3 for my x86_64 machine. Since it's based on Gentoo, I decided to take it to "world update", which meant going through a long process of emerging everything on my system. It took almost three days of solid compiling (my processor hates me), but it's worth it since I can now emerge the latest and greatest versions of my packages every night. This means I am now (almost) updated to the 3.4 release of Sabayon, which hasn't even been released yet!

It's probably the ridiculous bleeding-edgness of my installation that is causing the lockups, but I've noticed that they are decreasing in frequency as Sabayon 3.4 gets closer to its official release.