[Bug 281660] [NEW] KDE hangs completely sometimes, shows only KDM background and mouse pointer, likely caused by desktop effects

[Tore Anderson]

Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: kdebase-workspace

Hi,

I'm running a fully up-to-date Intrepid, and I've got problems with KDE
hanging from time to time.  When the hang happens, the background shown
by KDM and during KDEs initialisation procedure (the greyscale spirals
and spheres) are shown as well as the mouse pointer (which I can move
around normally), but nothing else.  It doesn't respond to any buttons
(like C-A-F1, C-A-Backspace, Alt-SysRq-B, and so on).

I've experienced it happening in these situations so far (that I can
remember, anyway):

1) Right after login and KDE intialisation, when the KDE workspace is supposed to appear (and the spirals background turns dark blue).
2) After the screensaver has been interrupted and is supposed to be turned off
3) After a suspend/resume cycle (this might be the same case as nr. 2 since it also activates the screensaver)
4) After exiting from playing a fullscreen movie (I've been using MPlayer).

I can reproduce case 4 quite easily by running "while sleep 1; do
mplayer -fs -frames 40 movie.avi; done", usually the crash will hapen
within a short time period but sometimes it will run fine for a long
time (exceeding my patience to wait).  However, when the movie is exited
and the KDE workspace reappears the very same greyscale spirals and
spheres background will flicker in for a brief amount of time.

So it seems like the bug will only happen if there's some full-screen
thing going on that completely covers the KDE workspace, and that
sometimes it will get stuck when trying to redraw it whent he full-
screen thing exits.

After disabling desktop effects I've not experienced the bug anymore.
Also it's worth noting that when I do the mplayer-in-a-loop test the
greyscale spirals does not flicker in after the movie exits either (at
least not that my eyes can see).

My laptop is a Lenovo X41s, which has an Intel GM965 graphics chip.

I'll soon attach some movies that shows the bug happening.

Tore

** Affects: kdebase-workspace (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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KDE hangs completely sometimes, shows only KDM background and mouse pointer, likely caused by desktop effects
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/281660
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