Cinnamon crashes...a lot

[Hardcase]

Repost - somehow I put this in the Mate subforum.

New Linux Mint user here, but I've used RedHat and Ubuntu for many years. Cinnamon is something new for me and I'm having a problem.

Cinnomon crashes into fallback mode fairly often. It seems to happen whenever something "graphical" is going on, such as displaying images or when there's a fair amount of hard drive activity. I'm using the latest Nvidia drivers on a GTS250.

As I was typing this and removing KDE (which I tried as an alternative to Cinnamon), Cinnamon crashed three times.

I grabbed this from the last few lines of dmesg:

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[59301.633089] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: irq 55 for MSI/MSI-X
[60516.862021] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: irq 55 for MSI/MSI-X
[60809.678152] traps: cinnamon[9528] general protection ip:7f1c3425ae3a sp:7fff4daae220 error:0 in libc-2.19.so[7f1c341da000+1bb000]
[60821.857934] systemd-hostnamed[10592]: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolveable. Please install nss-myhostname!
[60953.602683] traps: cinnamon[10961] general protection ip:7fa97b196f29 sp:7fff42e0c2a0 error:0 in libc-2.19.so[7fa97b116000+1bb000]
[62218.782600] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: irq 55 for MSI/MSI-X
[64887.229215] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: irq 55 for MSI/MSI-X
[65079.413248] traps: cinnamon[21862] general protection ip:7f18cce8de03 sp:7fffd9184b00 error:0 in libc-2.19.so[7f18cce0d000+1bb000]
[65089.863149] traps: cinnamon[22021] general protection ip:7f9949940dc3 sp:7fff7c6a8760 error:0 in libcogl-pango.so.15.3.1[7f994993d000+7000]

System is an Asrock Z97 Extreme4 with Intel i5 4690K and 8GB in four 2GB modules. System drive is a Crucial M300 SSD. Video is the Nvidia GTS250.

Output from inxi -Gxz:

Graphics: Card: NVIDIA G92 [GeForce GTS 250] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) Resolution: 1680x1050@60.0hz, 1680x1050@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTS 250/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 331.38 Direct Rendering: Yes


Any ideas?

[PatH57]

Hi,

to make sure you have the latest driver and xorg use this
http://www.howopensource.com/2012/10/in ... using-ppa/
and add these informations to your post

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uname -a

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cinnamon --version

[Hardcase]

drew@drew-desktop ~ $ uname -a
Linux drew-desktop 3.13.0-35-generic #62-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 15 01:58:42 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
drew@drew-desktop ~ $ cinnamon --version
Cinnamon 2.2.16

Following the directions to install the NVIDIA driver installs version 304.117. 340.32 is the latest driver.

[PatH57]

the ppa will give you the latest stable version just install it and check it (I've installed 340 with it) it's just the tuto that is a bit outdated.
After installing the ppa and doing the update, check control center and driver manager it will display all drivers available for your card.

[Hardcase]

Installing 340 via the ppa fixed the problem. Interestingly, something else that may have been aggravating the problem is that the BIOS was recognizing the DRAM as DDR3-1333, but it is actually 1066. I wonder what else in the DIMMs' SPDs is wrong? I guess I'll have to take them into work and check.

[PatH57]

is the front bus 266 or 333Mhz? the ram may be given for 1066 (266) but if the front bus is set to 333Mhz it will try to follow.
Good branded RAM may work as manufacturer produce one type only then test it at the highest speed and if it fails they just test it at a lower speed and validate it for this speed (or if they have enough stock brand it anyway for lower speed)
Same goes for CPU.
That's why people do try to "overclock" sometimes you are lucky sometimes not...

[Hardcase]

is the front bus 266 or 333Mhz? the ram may be given for 1066 (266) but if the front bus is set to 333Mhz it will try to follow.
Good branded RAM may work as manufacturer produce one type only then test it at the highest speed and if it fails they just test it at a lower speed and validate it for this speed (or if they have enough stock brand it anyway for lower speed)
Same goes for CPU.
That's why people do try to "overclock" sometimes you are lucky sometimes not...

I checked the DRAM in our lab here at work and the SPD was set wrong - it had DDR3-1333 settings. What you say about the DRAM testing is true (I'm an engineer at one of the manufacturers) - we do "speed bin" the DRAM, although we've never branded high speed as lower speed DRAM. In the module, there is a chip that is programmed with all of the pertinent information about the DRAM - data rate, timing information, etc. - that the BIOS queries. If you've set things to "auto", as I did, the BIOS just uses that data and sets everything accordingly. My problem was that my DIMMs were engineering samples from a few years ago that we'd finished testing with, but it looks like somebody had rewritten the SPD with higher speed settings. They worked fine in my old motherboard and in the new one with Windows, but not so well with Linux.

I did replace the DIMMs with brand new ones that are DDR3-1600. Everything worked fine until this morning when I logged in and Cinnamon crashed again. This is much better behavior than before, when it crashed every five minutes or so, depending on what I was doing (worse with stuff like GIMP, better with email and the like). I had no crashes with 304 and this one crash with 340. I'll keep on with 340 for a week or so and if it still crashes periodically, I'll revert to 304 and see what happens then.

[PatH57]

I knew about the RAM because I used to work for a major OEM and was looking after select accounts witch needed special settings. One was Phillips medical in Israel and they didn't accept standard ram or cpus without a special benchmark being run on them for 12 hours.

[bkt]

I've been running Mint w/ Cinnamon for some time and upgraded to Qiana a few weeks ago. Everything has been rock-solid until the other day when I installed some updates via the update manager. Since then, cinnamon has been crashing very frequently - several times an hour.

Some maybe-useful info:

uname -a:
Linux wolf 3.13.0-24-generic #46-Ubuntu SMP Thu Apr 10 19:11:08 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

cinnamon --version:
Cinnamon 2.2.16

inxi -Gxz:
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GK110 [GeForce GTX 780] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.15.1 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,vesa,nouveau) Resolution: 2560x1440@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 780/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.4.0 NVIDIA 331.38 Direct Rendering: Yes

According to Device Manager, I'm at the current and correct nvidia driver version.

I'm not unfamiliar with Linux but I'm not a genius with Mint or cinnamon. There's a reference above to installing a newer version of the nvidia drivers via the ppa. Can someone explain what that means or point me to a site that explains how to do it if you believe the problem is related to the nvidia driver?

The objective is to return to a rock-solid environment. Any suggestions are welcomed!