Compiz or Firefox

[Mario Vukelic]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 14:01 -0500, Leonard Smith wrote:
> Yeah, let me clarify.

Thanks

>  I first noticed the problem with firefox and
>   vmware. I quit using vmware (as it was virtually unusable) and tried
>  virtualbox. Seemed fine, at first, but then started having the same
>   issue with it. Now I've noticed it happen anytime I have two or more
>  of these applications running at the same time.

Ok, I start to see the picture now. 

Can you rule out completely that if you run any one of these program on
their own, the CPU issue does not occur?
Did you maybe test by first running each program without the others,
then running two of them in all possible pairings, and after that maybe
even three of them in the possible triplets?

I find it highly unlikely that arbitrary programs interact in such a
way, after all their address spaces are kept separate by the kernel.
IMHO the most likely culprit is one of the kernel modules. vmware has
one, your graphics driver module has one (since you run hardware
acceleration for compiz; if your card is not Intel, these drivers are
also proprietary, making them impossible to debug for kernel
developers). And Virtualbox also has one.

You could try reducing these module to the minimum: unload the vmware
module(s) and virtualbox module(s). Also, disable the proprietary driver
for X (if you use one. this is easiest done from menu System >
Administration > Hardware Drivers).

Then try to trigger the issue with one, two, three of the programs
running. I know it's a lot of work, but I have no idea how else to
systematically narrow it down.