Xorg/x11vnc crash (bug?)

Question

Hi all,
I'm having a really annoying problem and I think it is probably a bug, but wanted to check here first. When I am using x11vnc (and ONLY when using x11vnc), either directly or through ssh tunnel I am getting a hard lockup in X. Actually, 95% of the time that happens, but a few times I have dropped back to a slim login. I have tried downgrading both packages, both individually and together, still happens. This problem is in both my minimal (openbox) build and my fullblown gnome (both on the same hardware on different partitions). I have an Acer Aspire 4810T laptop with the intel i915 chipset. I cannot reproduce this on my salix, ubuntu or antix installs (all also on the same hardware, but of course using older versions of both packages). Until today I thought the entire system was locked, as I could not switch to another console, and could only use the sysrq procedure to restart, but today I discovered i could still ssh into the machine. Unfortunately there do not seem to be any errors logged, unless I am missing something. Is there a way I can force verbose logging on the xserver to see if I can get a clue as to what is happening? Anyone have any thoughts or seen this before? I have been searching fruitlessly for over a week, but with no error log it's a bit difficult to find a solution. Also, now that I discovered that I can still ssh in, I cannot seem to kill X so I can resume the session without rebooting. The process shows as defunct, but nothing I do seems to terminate it. Any thoughts there?
thanks in advance for any ideas,
k
oh, I'm running 64bit, and everything is up to date.
<edit> I just discovered I can restart the slim daemon and get back in without rebooting, but the root problem is still there. At least that is some progress! ;>}
Last edited by dharmabm (2010-11-24 10:08:42)

Answer 1

dharmabm wrote:Hi all,
I'm having a really annoying problem and I think it is probably a bug, but wanted to check here first. When I am using x11vnc (and ONLY when using x11vnc), either directly or through ssh tunnel I am getting a hard lockup in X. Actually, 95% of the time that happens, but a few times I have dropped back to a slim login. I have tried downgrading both packages, both individually and together, still happens.
There is a recent bug in Xorg that gives something that looks like a lock-up.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30032
The workaround is to apply the "-noxrecord" option to x11vnc.  Search for "x11vnc noxrecord" at ubuntuforums.org for more info on the problem.
There is an older bug in the Xorg X server where it is also crashed.  The workaround there is to supply "-noxfixes" x11vnc option to disable cursor fetching.  Try that too if "-noxrecord" doesn't work.