Issue

The following information has been provided by Red Hat, but is outside the scope of the posted Service Level Agreements and support procedures. The information is provided as-is and any  configuration settings or installed applications made from the  information in this article could make the Operating System unsupported  by Red Hat Global Support Services. The intent of this article is to  provide information to accomplish the system's needs. Use of the  information in this article at the user's own risk.

Issue

• We recently updated our system

• RHEL5 desktop crashes gdm after running applications such as VMware player 3 for example. 

• It then closes everything running requiring a relogin.

Environment

• Red Hat enterprise Linux 5
• Nvidia proprietory driver

Resolution

• Updating Nvidia driver to newer version (280) resolved the issue.

Diagnostic Steps

• Check if this problem is reproducible while using redhat provided nv or vesa driver?

• Is the problem seen with any other application which is shipped in RHEL?

• What are the exact steps to reproduce issue?

• Isolate two major components:

  • Application causing crash
  • Display driver

• If problem is observed even after isolating above components, isolate gdm so that X will not be restarted and we can get some useful information regarding problem. Follow below steps for this..

  • Boot the system in runlevel 3
  • Make sure system is configured to use redhat provided "nv" or "vesa" driver (in xorg.conf).
  • Login as any user and Run below command to enable core file in case of application crash

     ulimit -c unlimited

• Now run 'startx' command to start GUI session and then try to reproduce the issue with any of the application shipped in rhel.
• Once problem is observed, capture messages observed on system console (may be with digital snap of the screen) and capture fresh sosreport at the time problem is seen on the console.
• Also check if any core file is generated in current working directory from where startx (in cli mode) or the application (in gui mode) was run and if so, provide generated core file.