Various instabilities after resuming from standby

Added Christopher M. Penalver (penalvch) as requested in #1313847.
Sorry for coming back to you so late, I've been trying to find out more but couldn't determine anything.

Note that ubuntu-bug reported this to me when I started it from the command line:

ubuntu-bug xorg
Gtk-Message: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.
ERROR: hook /usr/share/apport/package-hooks/source_xorg.py crashed:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/report.py", line 197, in _run_hook
    symb['add_info'](report, ui)
  File "/usr/share/apport/package-hooks/source_xorg.py", line 677, in add_info
    attach_nvidia_info(report, ui)
  File "/usr/share/apport/package-hooks/source_xorg.py", line 521, in attach_nvidia_info
    attach_file(report, logfile)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/apport/hookutils.py", line 115, in attach_file
    report[key] = read_file(path, force_unicode=force_unicode)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/problem_report.py", line 627, in __setitem__
    assert k.replace('.', '').replace('-', '').replace('_', '').isalnum()
AssertionError

(process:7289): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_slice_set_config: assertion 'sys_page_size == 0' failed

Joachim Durchholz, thank you for reporting this and helping make Ubuntu better.

As per http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/92826/en-us , the latest version of the nvidia driver available for your card is 352.

Hence, could you please update to Wily, and advise if this is still reproducible with https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-352 ?

It's my main and only work machine, I can upgrade if and only if I can easily revert any upgrade.
I don't expect to be able to revert from Wily to Vivid, so that's not an option unless I can have guarantees.
A driver update would be fine, I can always go back to Nouveau, then reinstall the current Nvidia driver.

Given #1488206 and #1507328, and that I've been having these problems for years now, I do not expect the driver update to fix anything, but I can still check and see what's happening. (My bets are on a race condition somewhere in the wakeup software stack since the symptoms are so irreproducible, but I don't know how to validate that.)

More symptoms:

9) Sometimes (rarely), X stops recognizing the screen. I get a "default" screen @1024x768 instead of the VGA-0, LVDS-0, and DP0...DP-6 connections in xrandr --verbose. It does not help to reboot, not even when disconnecting from all power including battery. What does help is installing Nouveau, then reinstalling nvidia-current.

10) Sometimes (slightly more often than symptom nr. 9), I get the same as nr. 8, shutdown does not complete. I cannot get a console through Ctrl-Alt-F1, but I can Ctrl-Alt-F7 and get a graphic screen with a greyed-out desktop and an empty dialog window (there's a white title bar and a grey dialog area, but no title, no icons, no text, no buttons, no border, entirely unresponsive).
What I could do was to Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to the lock screen. From there, I could resume my normal session (just to restore the same greyed-out-with-unresponsible-dialog behaviour). I could also start a guest session, but I didn't try anything there because I believe guest isn't in the sudoers list.
Logging in with explicit user name gave me a black screen and unresponsiveness to Ctrl-Alt-F1 and Ctrl-Alt-F7, so I power cycled the machine and called it a day.

11) Did a reboot because graphics performance had dropped. Reboot through XFCE desktop would make the screen go black, pstree showed that the desktop still lived. reboot command from console would work, but boot into a black screen (after a brief display of a background and something that might have been the mouse pointer). Closing and opening the lid would not help, detaching the laptop from the docking station and Ctrl-Alt-F7 would restore the XFCE desktop, reattaching to the docking station would give access to the docking-station-connected screens.
So... something wasn't properly initialized with the docking station attached during boot.

For reference, I have placed the following script on a hotkey to switch from laptop to docking-station-connected screens.

#! /bin/sh
echo ================================================== >>/home/jo/xrandr.log
echo docked.sh >>/home/jo/xrandr.log
date >>/home/jo/xrandr.log
echo >>/home/jo/xrandr.log
xrandr --output DP-6 --auto >>/home/jo/xrandr.log 2>&1
xrandr --output LVDS-0 --off >>/home/jo/xrandr.log 2>&1
xrandr --output DP-3 --auto --left-of DP-6 --primary >>/home/jo/xrandr.log 2>&1

It's extremely rigid and unable to deal with any variation in the hardware situation, and sometimes is fails to disable LVDS-0 and cannot activate DP-3 afterwards (I think because there are only two CRTCs), but if all hardware is properly detected, it will work reliably on the second attempt... barely good enough so I don't have to redo Display configuration every time it fails to auto-reconfigure when attaching to or detaching from the docking station.

[Expired for xorg (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Please unexpire. This bug report is waiting for feedback from support.

Issues are persistent in Wily BTW. Can't say if they are exactly the same since the behaviour is so unstable.
Some of the old behaviour seems gone, but I'm getting new weirdnesses, such as lightdm spontaneously restarting after unsuspending.

That particular incident:
Unsuspend started the machine, final X log message after loading was
[ 32016.399] (**) Option "xkb_layout" "de"
I switched to console 1, started investigating pstree|less. After a while, the graphic screen came up with the login screen (which I had configured to never show up, but ah well).
X log has this to say:
[ 32024.769] (II) evdev: Dell WMI hotkeys: Close
Not sure whether that means "lid closed" or the power button, but I was typing on the USB keyboard, which has neither.

Not sure what to do next, any advice welcome.

Joachim Durchholz, regarding https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/1509326/comments/3 what version of the nvidia driver are you using?

I already have nvidia-352 installed.

Can you give me some instructions how to nail down the actual cause of these problems?
The symptoms are so varied and instrutable, it almost looks as if some race conditions deep down in the software stack leave stuff in inconsistent state.
Logging pertinent status information for each startup might be a good start.

The system is showing the login screen even though everything has been configured to not show the login screen. Finding out the reason why would be a good start, then I'd look for the reasons for the reason, until the root cause is found.
(This might even be a hardware glitch, but without any pointers to a concrete failure I can't turn in the machine for fixing. Also, if it's a hardware problem, it would be worth it submitting a bug report to whatever software subsystem should have logged it.)

Joachim Durchholz, to advise, the only issue that this report is scoped to is the resume from standby. For each issue different from this (ex. resuming from hibernate, issues that occur after restarting or coming back from a shutdown, etc.), you would want to file separate reports, one per issue.

Despite this, if you uninstall the nvidia driver, is the resume from standby issue still reproducible?

I can't file reports for different issues because I can't even name a single issue. All I'm seeing is sporadic but nonreproducible, somehow related failures. Some of them may be unrelated, some of them might be misconfiguration leftovers from previous installs or attempts at getting the machine to work reliably, but I have no way of determining which is which.

Trying nouveau now. It used to deliver insufficient performance to drive both of my monitors though; maybe it got upgraded, but I'm not confident.

Well, living with a single monitor for a while and seeing whether that fixes the problems.

Okay... I'm seeing some glitches with Nouveau, but not all.
1) Spontaneous wake-ups, not going to sleep when told to, and similar are gone.
2) There is still improper detection of monitor configuration changes between suspend and resume. Dlosing and reopening the lid fixed that in one instance, don't know whether that is a general rule.

Now that monitor detection is clearly identified as an unrelated problem, I agree it should go to a separate problem report.
How do I proceed about the spontaneous wake-ups?