[Intel-gfx] System freeze apparently due to GPU memory exhaustion - why?

[Joonas Lahtinen]

Hi,

On ti, 2016-02-23 at 11:55 +1000, Adam Nielsen wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm an end user and I'm having problems which I believe are ultimately
> caused by an issue with the Intel kernel driver.
> 
> When I am running programs that use a lot of images (e.g. GIMP, Firefox
> with YouTube and Google Maps) then after a short while my whole machine
> will grind to a halt, to the point where even my audio buffers don't
> get updated so I hear the same 500ms of audio repeated in a loop until
> the system comes back to life again.
> 
> Typically the system will stop responding from anywhere between 30
> seconds to a minute, and usually it returns to service after the kernel
> OOM killer has ended a process - typically Firefox as it uses the most
> system memory.
> 
> Of course it's not a system OOM problem, because the system has 16GB of
> RAM and the problem still happens even if less than 4GB is in use.
> 
> Looking at dmesg, the problem always starts with a message like this:
> 
>   Purging GPU memory, 69632 bytes freed, 48553984 bytes still pinned.
> 
> Since system memory is fine, I can only assume this means that there is
> some limit on the amount of memory the video driver can access, and it
> has reached that limit.
> 
> Here is the top of the backtrace, if it's relevant:
> 
>   Call Trace:
>    [] dump_stack+0x4b/0x72
>    [] dump_header+0x87/0x21e
>    [] ? i915_gem_shrinker_oom+0x1a1/0x200 [i915]
>    [] oom_kill_process+0x34b/0x3b0
>    [] out_of_memory+0x21f/0x490
>    [] __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x8c8/0x960
>    [] alloc_kmem_pages_node+0x7b/0x150
> 
> Can anyone shed any light on what's happening here?  Is there a limit
> to how much video memory the system can access?  I thought that was
> done away with once AGP disappeared but perhaps not.
> 

Can you attach a full dmesg from boot until the problem appears?

Regards, Joonas

> Is there any way to alleviate the problems this issue produces?  It's
> very annoying to be zooming around in Google Maps one moment and then
> dumped back to the console the next because the kernel killed X11.
> 
> My system is an Intel DH87MC w/ i7-4770K, kernel 4.3.3.  Three
> monitors, DVI + HDMI + DisplayPort, total res 4960x1600.
> 
> Many thanks,
> Adam.
> 
> 
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-- 
Joonas Lahtinen
Open Source Technology Center
Intel Corporation