MX froze 2x today

[Klaas Vaak]

I am running MX 17.1 as a VM host on a Win 64-bit guest. i have had MX installed for a week and am happy with it, but today it froze twice on me: suddenly nothing reacted anymore. I can't remember what I was doing the 1st time, but the 2nd time I had just logged into a Stackoverflow site.
In both cases I quit the VM and relaunched MX.
Any suggestions?

[Adrian]

MX is very stable in my experience, there might be two things that can affect its stability: hardware and software.
For hardware check I recommend doing at least a RAM test at the start up to make sure everything looks OK, if the computer has its own test suite (Dell for example come with a diagnostic option at boot time) use that too.

As for software you might want to see if there's a update for your VM driver, video driver or try a different kernel that might interact better with your hardware.

[Klaas Vaak]

Thanks for your feedback. Right, I too had the impression, and a short experience, of a stable OS.

Hardware is OK, in fact today I have had only 1 Windows program open with the VM and MX, against 5-6 Win progs normaly.
There is an update for VB which I have been ignoring, but so far, for the past few weeks I have been using VB without any trouble. Anyway, I.ll do the update and see what goes.

[Adrian]

Oh, one more thing if you are running VM you might run out of memory. Do you have a swap partition set up?

[Klaas Vaak]

@Adrian: no, I don't think I have a swap partition set up - how could I check?
If I have those 5-6 Win progs open, as described above, it can happen that the PC memory (total 6 Gb RAM) runs up to 90% and the response of the Win progs lags, whereas in the VB not really. And, as I stated, today I had just 1-2 Win progs open, and among those Firefox only for a short time.

[Adrian]

Typing "free" in terminal should give you an idea if you have swap or not, you can also check in /etc/fstab if you see a swap entry. If not I highly recommend creating a swap partition. You can use Gparted to repartition the disk, create a Swap partition equal to the amount of RAM (or less if you have a lot of RAM) and then edit /etc/fstab and add a line like this one:

Code: Select all

/dev/sd**  swap                                        swap       defaults                        0 0

Where "/dev/sd**" is the actual name of the partition.

[Klaas Vaak]

@Adrian: come to think of that, surely that is only applicable in a dual boot situation. An OS in a VM does not share anything with the host OS, that is the whole idea behind the VM. Or am I missing something?

[Adrian]

I am running MX 17.1 as a VM host on a Win 64-bit guest.

I think there's a terminology misunderstanding here, If you run MX on Windows the MX is guest and the Win is host, right? I mean that if you run Windows as a guest in VM might use all your memory that's why you'd need swap.

But even if you run MX as guest (in VM) you still probably need swap especially if you didn't assign enough memory to the VM.

In any case if you search the forum for "froze" or "frozen" you'd see that in many instances the solution was to create a swap partition. If you run out of RAM you need swap regardless if you run on bare metal or in Virtual Box.

[Stevo]

Running out of RAM while running a VM is a whole lot easier than you think, and even if you have a swap set up, using that when you run out of memory slows the system down by a factor of 100 times, so you might think it's frozen anyway. All you see is sporadic activity on the screen, but the drive is thrashing constantly.

You can add an XFCE panel plugin to monitor your memory use in realtime--I would recommend that, as well as reducing your "swappiness" from 60 to 10 or 20 when you do get a swap file. Google for how to do that, it's pretty simple.

Not to mention that many of our default Conky themes also monitor memory and swap use.

But this assumes that MX is the host, which is unclear from your OP.

[oops]

FYI: inxi can show this info:

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 inxi -p -admin
...
Partition:.
...
           ID-3: swap-1 size: 8.79 GiB used: 1.0 MiB (0.0%) fs: swap swappiness: 5 (default 60) 
           cache pressure: 50 (default 100) dev: /dev/sda6