KDE has locked up solid on me twice now

l008com

l008com

I have an old Mac mini I've been using to try to learn freeBSD. I have my own little how-to guide I'm slowly composing as I go and I periodically wipe the machine and "rebuild" it from scratch using my guide.

I tell you that only so you know where I'm coming from. This is essentially always a fresh install with very little software installed on it.

So after playing around with a few UIs, I decided KDE was my best choice.
However TWICE now, it has frozen solid on me. The cursor moves, but everything else including the clock, is frozen solid. I *can* SSH into the machine and everything seems to work there. But the GUI is frozen solid.

So I guess I have two questions:
1) Is there some way I can "quit" and "relaunch" KDE to recover from this state?
2) And any ideas why this is happening and how I can prevent it?

The hardware is currently a 2012 Mac mini. Eventually if I get confident enough with this OS, I'll end up running it on likely an HP rackmount machine.
 
I tried xfce4 for a while but I didn't like it. I like KDE a lot more. I like KDE enough that I'd really like to go with it.

Is there a known issue with kde + freebsd?

Also it just did it again, pretty quickly after booting this time. Thats the 3rd time so far.
 
16 GB and the boot drive is an SSD. And it has a 4 core i7 so i don't think its a performance thing.

Also it just did it again. Seems like KDE is fully shitting the bed here.
 
I also run FreeBSD on a late-middle-age 2014 Mac Mini 6,2 with 16GB ram, but mine is headless server, so I can't help with KDE/plasma on this hardware.
Suggest you investigate any video driver issues causing issues with your display.
 
l008com you can try another DE to see whether the problem is in graphics stack or the desktop environment. Also, do you have any relevant messages in the dmesg or X server stdout/err once the desktop locks up?

Plasma works normally on FreeBSD I've been using it as main DE for years.
 
l008com, what gpu are you using, is it a X11 or a wayland session? Is there any info on dmesg or on X11 logs, etc?

For X11 you can restart X with the ctrl+alt+backspace combo if you enabled it on the keyboard preferences. For wayland some compositors allow restarting without losing state (I think KDE is one of those), search online for that.
 
Alain De Vos will you please stop promoting Mate, mate? the question pertains to KDE. Good lord! ;)

But also, l008com, why do you never answer Alain De Vos?

I think that specifying which version of FreeBSD you have installed will be helpful. Mac Mini 2012 is also non-specific. Will you please post more info regarding graphics driver? I do not use KDE but it may depend upon Mesa to function properly. I tried to research Mac Mini support and i have found the following site:

fahrenheit has posted some helpful info for you.
 
Wasn't there a thread recently, maybe had "PlasmaShell" in the title talking about similar symptom that a solution/work around was disabling "show seconds" on things like clock and tooltips?

Root cause was reading timerfd stuff returning bad/random data so somthing started using 100% CPU?
That may be something to investigate.

Maybe start from a fresh system reboot, login, change the settings, save session (they may be autosaved), log out, reboot, login and see what happens.
The reboots may seem excessive, but it's a way of ensuring you are starting from scratch.

ctrl-alt-f# key will switch to another virtual terminal. If you can get there, try logging in and running "top" see what the CPU use is and what may be running at that.
100% CPU usage often manifests as "GUI locking up". Mouse events often start as interrupts so can still work.
 
Is KDE Wayland or X?

Not sure about KDE, but GNOME with GTK stuff forces Vulkan by-default or OpenGL. If the Mac Mini has Intel HD 4000 it might have incomplete Haswell Vulkan? If ANV is used, LTO's known to cause instability (iirc Mesa on FreeBSD uses LTO; ANV upstream has LTO too with a disable env). All that assumes KDE is doing something to use Vulkan though.

My go-to desktop is Xfce since X11's stable with it and it's easy to disable all GPU use with the DE.

This disables GPU for GTK stuff and defaults OpenGL vs OpenGLES (Qt might have similar envs):

Code: 
ee '/usr/local/etc/profile.d/general-tweaks.sh'

Code: 
# GTK
export GDK_DEBUG=gl-prefer-gl
export GDK_RENDERING=image
export GSK_RENDERER=cairo

Depending on how new Mesa is, I ran into random crashes the last few days with shader cache and Vulkan on UHD 630 with Mesa 26.0.2 on Linux with GTA V; disabling Mesa disk shader cache, DXVK's internal cache, and ANV GPL seemingly has stuff ok, but that wouldn't be fun to troubleshoot if the desktop and general apps were also involved using Vulkan.
 
Alain De Vos said:
The thing is i want to first evade drivers problem. But that is ok, we go to kde plasma.
Click to expand...
But to me it is like the following answer to a PHP question in a PHP forum:
'have you tried python?'

and i have seen this more than once:

Alain De Vos

Other Post in thread 'Can't change display resolution away from the default 1920 x 1080'

pkg install drm-kmod
sysrc kld_list+="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"
pkg install xf86-video-intel
reboot
exec mate(-desktop)
xrandr --verbose

Alain De Vos

Other Post in thread '"Lightweight Desktop" vs "feature-rich and resource intensive"'

I swear to mate , feature rich & lite.
  • Like

Alain De Vos

Post in thread 'KDE has locked up solid on me twice now'

Does mate desktop works ?

if we always take this route, then i would suggest installing Debian Linux and trying KDE with that instead of switching DEs. If it works with Debian, then we know it is a FreeBSD problem but this is not a very good answer - and it is time consuming.
 
I've been professional technical support engineer for years. I know how to tackle problems.
- This does not work. Help
-----> OK , lets try something more simple. But answer. Does this work.
- Until we finish in solving original problem.

Currently in the process of compiling KDE.

But like someone would say, I'll be back.
 
johnjohn said:
But to me it is like the following answer to a PHP question in a PHP forum:
'have you tried python?'

and i have seen this more than once:

Alain De Vos

Other Post in thread 'Can't change display resolution away from the default 1920 x 1080'

pkg install drm-kmod
sysrc kld_list+="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"
pkg install xf86-video-intel
reboot
exec mate(-desktop)
xrandr --verbose

Alain De Vos

Other Post in thread '"Lightweight Desktop" vs "feature-rich and resource intensive"'

I swear to mate , feature rich & lite.
  • Like

Alain De Vos

Post in thread 'KDE has locked up solid on me twice now'

Does mate desktop works ?

if we always take this route, then i would suggest installing Debian Linux and trying KDE with that instead of switching DEs. If it works with Debian, then we know it is a FreeBSD problem but this is not a very good answer - and it is time consuming.
Click to expand...
No , no , no , It's time consuming when you compare KDE on Debian ; KDE on mac ; KDE on FreeBSD. One should try first openbox/lxde/lxqt , on any of these.
I run FreeBSD/Arch-Linux/Gentoo-Linux/Ubuntu-Linux. And yes mate-desktop works on all of them. But not xfce4/cinnamon/kde.
If someone can explain to me why. I am very eager to listen and learn. But i have high doubts.
The best some persons come up with, yeah it works fine on mac but not on your crap bsd.
But then for their exotic hardware they can not even download a linux driver ...
Or when you ask /etc/os-release , you hear nothing more of them.
 
l008com said:
Also it just did it again. Seems like KDE is fully shitting the bed here.
Click to expand...

Hi OP - we hear you, but we are going to need more information from you in order to help you.

What O/S are you on? 15.0 or 14.x?
Is your hardware spec-ed out to what Apple had for a Mac Mini 2012 -- Aka (Link Apple): Mac mini (Late 2012) - Technical Specifications
What FreeBSD graphics driver are you using? Assuming something that works with: Intel HD Graphics 4000

I know you mentioned that you want to use KDE, but would Alain De Vos suggestion of using Mate or (also perhaps) Cinnamon work for you at the moment?
 
johnjohn said:
But to me it is like the following answer to a PHP question in a PHP forum:
'have you tried python?'

and i have seen this more than once:

Alain De Vos

Other Post in thread 'Can't change display resolution away from the default 1920 x 1080'

pkg install drm-kmod
sysrc kld_list+="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"
pkg install xf86-video-intel
reboot
exec mate(-desktop)
xrandr --verbose

Alain De Vos

Other Post in thread '"Lightweight Desktop" vs "feature-rich and resource intensive"'

I swear to mate , feature rich & lite.
  • Like

Alain De Vos

Post in thread 'KDE has locked up solid on me twice now'

Does mate desktop works ?

if we always take this route, then i would suggest installing Debian Linux and trying KDE with that instead of switching DEs. If it works with Debian, then we know it is a FreeBSD problem but this is not a very good answer - and it is time consuming.
Click to expand...
I believe Mate is just an example that Alain De Vos (and me) in hand that is far simpler than KDE plasma, not forcing to use it.

Even simplest x11-wm/twm that is installed as part of x11/xorg would be sufficient for just testing graphics subsystem using X11, but who want to keep on using it until the root cause is addressed and fixed even if it works for emergency?
Note that I have Xfce installed for emergency when Mate somehow got broken.

(I know at least some people still loves the minimalism of x11-wm/twm and using it, but this kind of people would never want to try large desktop environments like KDE.)

Unfortunately, I don't know what is the simplest compositor for Wayland comparable with x11-wm/twm on X11 to test graphics subsystem. So I'm using x11-wm/wayfire to test NVIDIA driver ports allow Wayland to show the screen and open some apps just for the purpose. (x11-wm/wayfire was NOT what I wanted, but once tried whether it works as I want or not, thus, having it on bare-metal environment.)
 
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