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From: Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Weird Arch issues
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 12:53:41 -0400
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vallor wrote this post and blinked twice:

> On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 09:07:58 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us>
> wrote in <vdm4ve$3nuv0$3@dont-email.me>:
>
>> So all was basically hunky-dory on this old ASUS laptop (apart from the
>> login issue; I have to go to a virtual console, login there, and run
>> startx).
>> 
>> Looking at the rat's nest of cables in the "office", I powered
>> everything down... the router, the interface to AT&T fiber, the MIDI
>> devices, the laptop....
>> 
>> After the cleanup (much nicer), I powered up and logged in. Then came a
>> couple of weird issues, and I am not sure why.
>> 
>> 1. YouTube took forever to open a video, and would not play. I
>> reinstalled,
>>    renamed the Chromium and Firefox configuration directories, and
>>    eventually got them to play. But no sound from YouTube (which would
>>    play audio out the laptop speakers.  MPD played fine (through the
>>    Behringer USB audio box). Using yt-dlp to download a video from
>>    YouTube worked fine, fast as ever.
>> 
>>    On the Lenovo laptop, no problem. Still at a loss, nothing I've tried
>>    works. I disabled all Chrome extensions (Dark Reader and Vimium),
>>    nada.
>> 
>> 2. I wanted to rearrange my music directory and copy it to a USB drive.
>>    At about 28Gb, it should have taken around 5 minutes to copy.
>>    Instead, it took hours. Not sure if it's a VM issue. Today I copied
>>    the music to my Android phone, and it took around 5 minutes.
>> 
>> At times during the copy from the cheapo SSD to the USB, the system
>> would undergo long pauses.
>> 
>> The output of "sysctl -a | grep dirty":
>> 
>>     vm.dirty_background_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10
>>     vm.dirty_bytes = 0 vm.dirty_expire_centisecs = 3000 (5 minutes)
>>     vm.dirty_ratio = 20 vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 500
>>     vm.dirtytime_expire_seconds = 43200 (!!)
>> 
>> The setting maintain on the Lenovo.
>> 
>> Sigh.
>
> Does dmesg -T show anything while trying to play back video?  I've
> had a machine throw PCiE retries before, causing unusual behavior
> with various peripherals.  Does it have a discrete GPU?  Maybe it
> bumped loose.

Doesn't show anything that could be related.

> Also, run free(1) and make sure you didn't lose memory.  Perhaps you
> bumped the laptop and had memory unseat.

Nah, I moved the rolling desk with the laptop on it, but no bumps.

> Certainly sounds like hardware.

There's some hanky-panky going on. 

I can download a video and it plays fine in VLC (but not in mplayer or
smplayer). (I'm watching a podcast with Larry Fast that I downloaded right
now).

Had a weird issue where booting wouldn't work; powering off and restarting
was fine then.

I just rebuilt a small project using g++ (and meson). No problem.
Then I rebuilt it with clang, and got an ERROR: Compiler clang cannot
compile programs.

Reinstalled clang, and then the build worked.

I'm wondering if my $28 512Gb SSD is a piece of crap.

-- 
You're being followed.  Cut out the hanky-panky for a few days.