Hi, I just had a complete meltdown as I never saw it before, and I do computer assistance as a job. I just had firefox, vuze and piding running and were chatting with a friend when all of the sudden my screen began flickering very fast and the cpu usage of one of my two cores jumped up to 100%. I lost control over keyboard and mouse except for short periods (lag). Even S-Abf didn't do it's job. Also Ctrl+Alt+F1 didn't respond. At least not at once. After quite a long time, about one minute, Ctrl+Alt+F1 acted and i got to my terminal as if running normally. I entered "top" and saw that java is running with 18% and some small stuff with <1%. But after one update interval "top" showed my firefox is running with a stunning 9999% of my CPU. WOW! That's quite a lot for a dual core machine. (And any other machine I guess..) After killing firefox with -s KILL everything returned to normal. Well nearly everything: when I got back to my desktop using Ctrl+Alt+F7 the background image of the desktop didn't appear and there was some weird parts of my former screen mixed up, showing parts of vuze, parts of piding, parts of firefox and parts of my desktop in random order. As well as some normal graphic errors/repeats. I have a screenshot but there's some sensetive information on it and after clearing that there wouldn't be much left. So if you need to see it, mail me and I'll show u. But I don't think it contains much information about what happened. This really came out of nowhere, I have no idea what could have caused it. The pages in firefox where purely normal and harmless pages without javascript or stuff like that. After restoring the situation I saw my battery light of my notebook blinking as it does shortly before powering down due to low energy. Maybe the change from enough energy to low energy triggered this behaviour. Here some log output dmesg | tail -n 30 http://pastebin.com/f24360996 tail /var/log/message | tail -n 100 http://pastebin.com/f40941a0f Reproducible: Couldn't Reproduce Steps to Reproduce: 1. I guess it's something about the laptop battery 2. I tried to reproduce by getting the energy down 3. But nothing happened, as it's supposed to Actual Results: *blink* *flicker* *lag* Expected Results: Anything but what happened Serious meltdown. Inexperienced user would have panicked, maybe have thrown notebook out of window ;)
Some stuff is still messed up. For example vlc which also run before in the background has now the smilies from pidgin as volume control. Also the buttons have no captions anymore. Also the vlc and skype tray icons are now invisible, but still occupy the width they would normally and also function.
Try rebooting.
Reboot? Gentoo? Is this Windows or what? After reboot the problems seem to be all gone btw. Only whenever I start firefox I get an DBus error message which I ignore since the window showing the messages hangs and firefox opens up shortly after.
Obvious hardware failure.
