Friday, December 2, 2016

Fedora rawhide kernel panic Virtualbox

I'm now running on a very slow PC being disassembled Asus 1215N with O/Ced Atom CPU to 2.35Ghz. As far as I managed to upgrade windows 7 to x64 version I can not make magically VT-x appear on this CPU, that was the reason why I ran into problems when tried to boot Fedora rawhide i686 in Virtualbox. Basically the problem occurs with kernels versioned 4.7+, it seems to boot fine with 4.6 one. On Virtualbox forums there was some discussion that it may be related to virtual box display driver from virtualbox extension pack being installed (and of course VT-x being unavailable making I/O APIC option not performing correctly without it - or so I believe after I did my tests). So far I have it running with kernel 4.6 and dnf-ing around the OS, that takes ages due to slowness caused by no VT-x being available. If I find a way on how to run kernel 4.9 with my configuration, I will share this information.

And here is some interesting stuff with DNF, it can even erase "None", lol:


Thursday, December 1, 2016

Chrome/Chromium hangs often

Recently I ran into a problem when my Chromium browser was hanging a lot when I activated the window or few seconds after opening new tab. First I VACUUM-ed every SQLite file in my profile directory... Didn't help... Then I run procmon tool to show me what exactly was it doing on my harddrive, then I found out it was reading some files, so I went through every one of them, renaming them by adding .bak extension. And then vua la, I found out what was causing it. It turns out it was Preferences file growing too big (even though it was just 450KB) when You visited a lot of various sites in the past, as it saves some preferences for every one of them and the engine/parts of code to read it back and analyze seem to be very inefficient, not to say, shitty. So imo that part requires some kind of inspection to be performed by Chromium/Chrome DEVs as currently it's giving Chromium even 1 minute hangs every now and then.

To fix Chrome/Chromium hangs:
- close all running instances of Chrome/Chromium,
- go to Your Chrome/Chromium Default profile, usually %LocalAppData%\Chromium\User Data\Default for Windows users,
- find Preferences file,
- rename it to Preferences.bak or remove it,
- run Chrome/Chromium,
- lags/hangs should be gone now,
- in case they are not, You may be having some other problematic file that, maybe, uses JSON format to store data as well. In other words its structure should be having a lot of { } " " : chars as well, maybe the other one got too big for You?

You may have some settings reset to default like Chrome/Chromium asking to be default browser or having Translate messages scaring You a lot, unfortunately, You must get past it again now. :)