From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Is there any way to kill Chrome _other_ than power cycling?
So far I've not encountered any problems pulling the plug, but
it'd be nice if there's a more graceful way to get Chrome out of
the way.

A break to debugger key sequence would be better than nothing.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

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On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 05:05:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote in <u0gb5s$3a9v9$1@dont-email.me>:

From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Is there any way to kill Chrome _other_ than power cycling?
So far I've not encountered any problems pulling the plug, but
it'd be nice if there's a more graceful way to get Chrome out of
the way.

A break to debugger key sequence would be better than nothing.

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

That said, I moved to firefox, it somehow imported my chromium bookmarks too. Interestng is
1) firefox is faster
2) my data usage has dropped significantly when doing the same thing / visiting the same sites every day
I do have addblock installed.

I was a seamonkey user in x86, and before that firefox.
firefox user interface is more pleasant to me, may be a question of getting used to it though.
Have not tried youtube on firefox yet, can always use chromium if that does not work
or use the laptop..

Maybe chromium does not hang but just needs more time?
seems to chache a lot too.

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bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:

From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Is there any way to kill Chrome _other_ than power cycling?
So far I've not encountered any problems pulling the plug, but
it'd be nice if there's a more graceful way to get Chrome out of
the way.

Is this a Pi running with a local display and keyboard etc.? If so
then doesn't CTRL+ALT+Fn (where n is 1 to 6) get you to a console
login which would enable you to log in to a command line and kill
chrome (or even the GUI).

Alternatively if you have remote access to the Pi then ssh to a
command line and kill chrome.

--
Chris Green
·

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Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 05:05:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska
<bp@www.zefox.net> wrote in <u0gb5s$3a9v9$1@dont-email.me>:

From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Is there any way to kill Chrome _other_ than power cycling?

[snip]

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If it's not possible to open a graphical terminal window, then
first Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch out of X and then execute the command.
Switching back to X depends on how many terminal instances are
running, if one then Ctrl-Alt-F2, if more then
Ctrl-Alt-F[something] (work your way through them all).

If you're running Wayland instead of X, then I've got no idea.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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On 04/04/2023 08:53, Chris Green wrote:

bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:

From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Is there any way to kill Chrome _other_ than power cycling?
So far I've not encountered any problems pulling the plug, but
it'd be nice if there's a more graceful way to get Chrome out of
the way.

Is this a Pi running with a local display and keyboard etc.? If so
then doesn't CTRL+ALT+Fn (where n is 1 to 6) get you to a console
login which would enable you to log in to a command line and kill
chrome (or even the GUI).

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill/restart the xserver is another.
I have had occasions where nothing seemed to work, usually associated
with networking issues.

Alternatively if you have remote access to the Pi then ssh to a
command line and kill chrome.

--
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will
eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such
time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic
and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for
the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the
truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

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The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill/restart the xserver is another.

Hasn't that been disabled by default for years on most distros?

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On 04/04/2023 12:44, Andy Burns wrote:

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill/restart the xserver is another.

Hasn't that been disabled by default for years on most distros?

Dunno. Works for me on Mint Mate

--
"Corbyn talks about equality, justice, opportunity, health care, peace, community, compassion, investment, security, housing...."
"What kind of person is not interested in those things?"

"Jeremy Corbyn?"

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On 2023-04-04, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If you can't get a terminal window open (that happens to my
Debian tower sometimes when my display driver hangs), you can
ssh into the box from another machine and do the kill that way.
Worst case, you can force a reboot and get an orderly shutdown.

I was a seamonkey user in x86, and before that firefox.

At the risk of thread drift, why did you stop using Seamonkey?
I'm using it because Firefox changed the user interface in ways
I didn't like starting in release 29. But there are a small
but increasing number of web sites that Seamonkey can't handle,
so I have to fall back to Firefox for them.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | You can't save the earth
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | unless you're willing to
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | make other people sacrifice.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | -- Dogbert the green consultant

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Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 05:05:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska

[snip]

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If it's not possible to open a graphical terminal window, then

Worse than that, clicking on an existing terminal window didn't
grant it focus. I'd forgotten (again) about ctrl-alt-Fn and will
try that next time the machine gets stuck, but when it happened
again this morning I did check the caps lock LED and it doesn't
react to the caps lock key, so it looks like the keyboard isn't
being read even though the mouse still tracked.

first Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch out of X and then execute the command.
Switching back to X depends on how many terminal instances are
running, if one then Ctrl-Alt-F2, if more then
Ctrl-Alt-F[something] (work your way through them all).

In normal operation there are close to a dozen terminal sessions,
five or six windows with a few tabs each. I've seen no indication
the machine is low on resources. It's an 8 GB Pi4, could that be
too much for it? I've never noticed the machine swapping, ever.
I just noticed I haven't set up a hardware swap partition, so
all it has is the 100 MB swapfile set up in the image file.

If you're running Wayland instead of X, then I've got no idea.

I'm running whatever is default for 64 bit RasPiOS. Is there some
way to check if Wayland's in use?

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

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On 04/04/2023 06:05, bob prohaska wrote:

From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Unless its a 4GB or more RPi 4B, it's probably running out of memory and hitting the brick wall of swapping to the SD card. It might take a
couple of minutes to become responsive enough again for you to close
tabs or quit the browser completely.
> Is there any way to kill Chrome _other_ than power cycling?

So far I've not encountered any problems pulling the plug, but
it'd be nice if there's a more graceful way to get Chrome out of
the way.

You could try ssh'ing in to kill the browser remotely, but when swapping
the ssh client will probably timeout, or be unusably slow.

A break to debugger key sequence would be better than nothing.

You could set up the hardware watchdog to automatically reboot the
machine after it has become unresponsive, but that's probably not hat
you want when using it interactively.

---druck

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bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 05:05:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska

[snip]

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If it's not possible to open a graphical terminal window, then

Worse than that, clicking on an existing terminal window didn't
grant it focus. I'd forgotten (again) about ctrl-alt-Fn and will
try that next time the machine gets stuck, but when it happened
again this morning I did check the caps lock LED and it doesn't
react to the caps lock key, so it looks like the keyboard isn't
being read even though the mouse still tracked.

Doesn't sound good, but it depends on how the drivers are set up.
Also Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is the common command to close X entirely
and return to the terminal, so you might as well try that as well
if ctrl-alt-Fn doesn't work for you.

first Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch out of X and then execute the command.
Switching back to X depends on how many terminal instances are
running, if one then Ctrl-Alt-F2, if more then
Ctrl-Alt-F[something] (work your way through them all).

In normal operation there are close to a dozen terminal sessions,
five or six windows with a few tabs each. I've seen no indication
the machine is low on resources. It's an 8 GB Pi4, could that be
too much for it? I've never noticed the machine swapping, ever.
I just noticed I haven't set up a hardware swap partition, so
all it has is the 100 MB swapfile set up in the image file.

I'd guess some sort of bug in the GPU driver is bing triggered, or
maybe the GPU itself in your Pi4 is getting flaky.

If you're running Wayland instead of X, then I've got no idea.

I'm running whatever is default for 64 bit RasPiOS. Is there some
way to check if Wayland's in use?

Check "ps -A | grep Xorg" returns a match, or run "xdpyinfo" in a
graphical terminal window and see if it spits out lots of info. I
don't think Wayland would be default though, so X should be a safe
assumption.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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On 5 Apr 2023 09:24:04 +1000, not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) declaimed the following:

bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:

I'm running whatever is default for 64 bit RasPiOS. Is there some
way to check if Wayland's in use?

Check "ps -A | grep Xorg" returns a match, or run "xdpyinfo" in a
graphical terminal window and see if it spits out lots of info. I
don't think Wayland would be default though, so X should be a safe >assumption.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-bullseye-update-april-2022/

Don't find anything newer.

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On 2023-04-04, druck <news@druck.org.uk> wrote:

On 04/04/2023 06:05, bob prohaska wrote:

From time to time RasPiOS seems to hang in chromium, locking up
the desktop. The mouse pointer still tracks, but clicking on
icons or typing produces no response. The problem seems linked
to the Chrome browser. The machine seems to be up to date as
of the latest incident.

Unless its a 4GB or more RPi 4B, it's probably running out of memory and hitting the brick wall of swapping to the SD card. It might take a
couple of minutes to become responsive enough again for you to close
tabs or quit the browser completely.

If the Pi is running a compress-to-RAM swap setup, there is a
possibility of the compressed swap getting deadlocked.

Some years ago, I discovered that Tiny Core Linux (runs with
compress-to-RAM swap) would deadlock during periods of full-out
disk traffic on a high-end server with tons of RAM (for the
time). Disabling the compress-to-RAM swap thing cured that. (I
might have been able to solve it by setting swappiness to _never_
swap, but it was easier to just disable the swap setup entirely.)

HTH

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

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On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 19:57:45 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote in <u0hvfo$3hu45$1@dont-email.me>:

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 05:05:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska

[snip]

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If it's not possible to open a graphical terminal window, then

Worse than that, clicking on an existing terminal window didn't
grant it focus. I'd forgotten (again) about ctrl-alt-Fn and will
try that next time the machine gets stuck, but when it happened
again this morning I did check the caps lock LED and it doesn't
react to the caps lock key, so it looks like the keyboard isn't
being read even though the mouse still tracked.

Ah, I had that several times, wireless keyboard, remove USB adaptor, then put it back in again
fixes it every time...

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On a sunny day (Tue, 04 Apr 2023 18:32:09 GMT) it happened Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote in <J2_WL.2333871$GNG9.588531@fx18.iad>:

On 2023-04-04, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If you can't get a terminal window open (that happens to my
Debian tower sometimes when my display driver hangs), you can
ssh into the box from another machine and do the kill that way.
Worst case, you can force a reboot and get an orderly shutdown.

I was a seamonkey user in x86, and before that firefox.

At the risk of thread drift, why did you stop using Seamonkey?
I'm using it because Firefox changed the user interface in ways
I didn't like starting in release 29. But there are a small
but increasing number of web sites that Seamonkey can't handle,
so I have to fall back to Firefox for them.

I still have seamonkey on my x86 laptop, but it no longer works
as it runs an a slackware from 2013 and these day gives all sorts of access problems on websites...


Really need to update that laptop:-)
I do have an Ubuntu for it somewhere

So is there a seamonkey for raspi?

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On 05/04/2023 03:20, Robert Riches wrote:

On 2023-04-04, druck <news@druck.org.uk> wrote:

On 04/04/2023 06:05, bob prohaska wrote:
Unless its a 4GB or more RPi 4B, it's probably running out of memory and
hitting the brick wall of swapping to the SD card. It might take a
couple of minutes to become responsive enough again for you to close
tabs or quit the browser completely.

If the Pi is running a compress-to-RAM swap setup, there is a
possibility of the compressed swap getting deadlocked.

Good point, I've tried zram swap back when I was trying to web browse on
a 1GB 3B+, and had it unrecoverably hang a few times.

When I got the 4GB and then 8GB 4B's I disabled it and set up physical
swap on an SSD. That gets a couple of hundred MB shunted in to it over
the course of things, but has never started swapping. Certainly no
unexplained lock ups.

---druck

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Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-bullseye-update-april-2022/

Don't find anything newer.

This just out, maybe it'll help:
The following packages will be upgraded:
ghostscript libgs9 libgs9-common linux-libc-dev raspberrypi-bootloader
raspberrypi-kernel
6 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Fingers crossed, along with all other appendages 8-)

bob prohaska

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Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

bob prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> wrote:

Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid> wrote:

On a sunny day (Tue, 4 Apr 2023 05:05:00 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska

[snip]

In a terminal, as root
killall -KILL chromium-browser

If it's not possible to open a graphical terminal window, then

Worse than that, clicking on an existing terminal window didn't
grant it focus. I'd forgotten (again) about ctrl-alt-Fn and will
try that next time the machine gets stuck, but when it happened
again this morning I did check the caps lock LED and it doesn't
react to the caps lock key, so it looks like the keyboard isn't
being read even though the mouse still tracked.

Doesn't sound good, but it depends on how the drivers are set up.
Also Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is the common command to close X entirely
and return to the terminal, so you might as well try that as well
if ctrl-alt-Fn doesn't work for you.

first Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch out of X and then execute the command.
Switching back to X depends on how many terminal instances are
running, if one then Ctrl-Alt-F2, if more then
Ctrl-Alt-F[something] (work your way through them all).

In normal operation there are close to a dozen terminal sessions,
five or six windows with a few tabs each. I've seen no indication
the machine is low on resources. It's an 8 GB Pi4, could that be
too much for it? I've never noticed the machine swapping, ever.
I just noticed I haven't set up a hardware swap partition, so
all it has is the 100 MB swapfile set up in the image file.

I'd guess some sort of bug in the GPU driver is bing triggered, or
maybe the GPU itself in your Pi4 is getting flaky.

No problems in the past day, with chrome running nytimes.com, youtube,
animated weather imagery and occasional forays on amazon. I still
harbor a predjudice that nytimes.com is at least part of the trouble,
but repeatable evidence is exceedingly scarce..

If you're running Wayland instead of X, then I've got no idea.

I'm running whatever is default for 64 bit RasPiOS. Is there some
way to check if Wayland's in use?

Check "ps -A | grep Xorg" returns a match, or run "xdpyinfo" in a
graphical terminal window and see if it spits out lots of info. I
don't think Wayland would be default though, so X should be a safe assumption.

I get
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ ps -A | grep Xorg
1624 tty1 01:21:14 Xorg
bob@raspberrypi:~ $ ps -A | grep wayland
bob@raspberrypi:~ $
so I guess it's Xorg.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

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