Windows 8 Consumer Preview issues

Windows 8 Consumer Preview issues

Can this thread be a place for issues seen on this platform? The few posts I've seen mentioning it are scattered, so I thought one place would make sense.

I'll start with one that's pretty vague for the moment but which I believe is tied to Win8 (x64 in my case, but I'm not using Opera x64 yet). I suspect it's related to a bad interaction with the video driver (Intel HD 3000), since video drivers in general seem to be more unfinished than the rest of Win8, but that's just a guess. I've tried a couple different versions of the driver with no change in behavior.

I started with Win8 at the beginning of the month, and all was well with 1325. Build 1328 came out mid-month though, and starting shortly after that I've experienced what basically amounts to lockups. It's not a total freeze--I might be able to switch among open apps for a while, and I can open Task Manager. But I can't actually do anything (for example, ending tasking on Opera, which doesn't appear hung in TaskMan, does nothing). It's as if the screen isn't representing reality. Eventually, I just hard reset, since shutdown/restart doesn't work either.

The same thing happens with 1351/1359, which I only tried briefly since they're generally unstable for people anyway and so not something that I can use to clarify anything. It doesn't happen with 1325 though. I haven't noted that doing anything in particular with Opera triggers this. Having it running for a while seems to be enough, though it can sometimes go a day without showing the problem; other days, it can happen 3 or 4 times.

Hardware acceleration is disabled in all cases. Intel isn't supported anyway.

Confirmed, Same here on Windows 8 CP

Does not matter if hardware acceleration is enabled or disabled, computer randomly freezes!

I am expecting that Opera 12 will fully support windows 8 CP, since it will be launched shortly after Opera 12. May be even closer, because some news report that Windows 8 might be released this summer. " So Wndows 8 support is mandatory in Opera 12"

@rseiler: Please submit a bug report on this issue!

OK, will do, though the steps to reproduce are going to be a little vague. I don't know of a way to make it happen on demand yet, do you?

At least it doesn't seem directly related to the Intel video driver, since you have an AMD 5750. The clue to the cause must be in the difference between 1325 and 1328 (and with later builds, but I think it's easier just to compare these two specifically, since they're only 11 days apart, but also because later builds are wildly unstable even with Win7).

Sorry! i also don't know how to reproduce this freeze issue. It just happens randomly!

Here's where we can send any further information on this issue:

DSK-361105@bugs.opera.com

Looking forward to a good response from Opera Devs!

Windows 8 Consumer Preview x86 - Intel GMA 3150 (OpenGL HWA not supported). Build 1351 was working fine without freezes.

@mubaidr, are you running the x86 or x64 version? I'm running x86 (Core i5-2500K, 8GB RAM).

@Swapnil99pro, how long have you been using post-1325 builds on Win8?

Originally posted by rseiler:

how long have you been using post-1325 builds on Win8?

I used 1328 for enough time (3-4 days) - but mostly to browse MS TechNet - so your freezes might be website-related. I haven't used 1351 for more than a day - but no freezes till the time I have used them.

Yes, I agree, that's another complication -- it could easily be related to what you're doing with Opera. I'm very tempted to try just having it open all day, with no sites at all, and not do anything with it while continuing to use 1325 to get real work done. I'll try that with the new 1360, in fact.

I was using x64 Opera.

i3 2100
8Gb ram
AMD 5750

I have also had issues with Opera 12 and Win8 CP. My extensions don't work; LastPass won't log-in, extension pages and dialog panels buttons don't respond to mouse clicks or keyboard (the panels I can only dismiss with the close windows 'X' icon). I have a consistent lock-up with Flash 11.2 (pegs one processor every time, makes Opera unresponsive), happens in 32-bit and 64-bit; but it appears this affects all my other browsers, too, so this is likely a Flash problem.

mubaidr, have you used 1360 for real work yet? I had it open for a day--minimized, with only Speed Dial open--but nothing blew up. It really needs to be used for it to happen, I guess, but I couldn't risk another hang this week to try it. I will this weekend though if you don't/haven't. Maybe we can take turns on trying new builds.

Okay! i tried 1360 32bit now, but while browsing computer freezes. Back to 11.62, since both x86 and x64 builds are causes of freezes.

OK, thanks. I'll try the next build then.

BTW, just to ensure that we're on the same page, you don't have a problem with 1325, right?

Originally posted by rseiler:

OK, thanks. I'll try the next build then.BTW, just to ensure that we're on the same page, you don't have a problem with 1325, right?

Yes. It was working fine upto build 1328.

Just want to confirm, if Opera queries system for hardware info?


Windows 8 has newer ACPI driver, cpu-z and other system information utilities does not work with it, causes freezes for most of users (including me). But Aida64 updated their software (when reported about this issue) and it works fine.
http://forums.aida64.com/index.php?/topic/524-windows-8-support


Just wondering is this could be issue with Opera?

One more thing, When ever i try to run Opera in "compatibility mode for Windows 7" or "Run as administrator". Opera causes high cpu usage (compared to normal running instance) during browsing and small lockups, lags or freezes occurs.

Can anybody confirm?

I just tried Win7 compat and then admin with 11.62 and didn't see anything unusual CPU-wise or otherwise, but I only used it for about 5 minutes. Problems don't often turn up in that amount of time.

I like your idea about ACPI, though I'd be a little surprised if a browser is involved with it at all. Still, if we have to figure this out ourselves, and months will probably go by while we try, then we'll have to think of many possibilities.

Run Opera with Administrative previlages and windows 7 mode. Then start sunspider test here, and notice lags. compare this run with normal running Opera.

No, still nothing. When running Sunspider, the CPU hovers between 15-20 with or without those settings, and afterwards I don't notice anything unusual. Fortunately, there's no need to run Opera with either of those settings, right?

Well, wish me luck. I'm entering combat with 1372.

Originally posted by rseiler:

No, still nothing. When running Sunspider, the CPU hovers between 15-20 with or without those settings, and afterwards I don't notice anything unusual.

For me, background changes and progress par freezes with small intervals, compared to normal running Opera.

Originally posted by rseiler:

Fortunately, there's no need to run Opera with either of those settings, right?

I was just checking if it can solve freeze problem, but no luck!

Originally posted by rseiler:

Well, wish me luck. I'm entering combat with 1372.

It did nt worked for me! Still the same behaviour.



Why no Opera Mod/Dev is replying to this forum? (Or this is a user to user forum?) Atleast take notice of this problem.

Collected statements from 1372 commentary:

Xombie said:
[In reference to the main topic of this thread, the freezing problem] "Same here! Please Opera Devs, have a look on problem!"

Meseer said:
"High cpu usage on Windows 8. UI is lagging unbearably. opera:cpu is very slow, switching between tabs is slow, entering text to edits (including address bar) is lagging as well."

Christoph said:
"Believe it or not: Win8 CP x64 works pretty nice with the x64 Opera Next over here... no HWA though."

New test results:

I disabled some power saving features in bios (c3/c6 power saving feature, EIST) and running Opera with Administrative previlages! Opera has never caused a problem for about 8hours Dont know how it could be related. Anyway i am still testing... will let u know!

That is a puzzler indeed.

After reading more commentary on 1372, with numerous posts mentioning freezes UNrelated to Win8 (e.g. in Win7), we have to remember that the 1351+ builds are especially treacherous to use to unravel what might be going on with Win8 and Opera because this type of problem now isn't exclusive to Win8. So that leaves us with 1328 as a test build, which for people not on Win8 doesn't freeze. 1328 may or may not even still be relevant considering its age, or might have had a one-off problem, meaning what if what we (and others not on Win8) are seeing in 1351+ is not the same thing as what we're seeing only in Win8 with 1328? There, I just confused even myself. I'm not sure the smoke will clear on this again until a new build comes out where people aren't talking about it freezing in Win7.

^ It worked fine for me for whole day! dont know which step solved the problem. but now its gone!

tumblr freezes opera badly....

ubuntu ocelotl

mubaidr, I think now with 1387 that it might be the time to try running it as before. (I find it really hard to understand how your BIOS power settings relate to this at all, since the problem happens when the machine is awake; you had also tried running as admin before without success.) The bug below is the one that caused page freezing for many people in Win7, at least, so maybe it'll help with us too. I'm testing 1387 here now (x86 build, HWA/OpenGL disabled).

DSK-360316 Opera stops loading pages after a while

^ this bug is related to page freezing, but in our case whole windows is freezing.

Did u try disabling EIST in the BIOS? give it a try. Because since i changed my bios settings, never had any isue with any build.

There must be something to do with C3/C6 settings or EIST. Since Runing as admin did not solved problem for me!

Right, but they're similar sounding. It didn't help anyway. In fact, 1387 was the worst of all: a total hard freeze, about a half hour in. At least before I could limp around and sort of do a couple things with Task Manager, though nothing meaningful.

No, I didn't try playing with the BIOS. That's not a practical workaround, and it wouldn't even be consistent from system to system. We'll have to keep trying to tough it out if there's to be any hope of Opera getting feedback on this.

Hmmm... Feedback from Opera mod is necessory!

OR may be Wait for Windows 8 release. Because this issue might be related to EIST driver in WIndows 8, just saying!

But whatever if one want to use these build son WIndows 8, disabling EIST is main issue!

Though you mentioned changing C3/C6 too. Did you change that back?

It might be fun enabling EIST (SpeedStep, for those wondering) again but then going into the active power plan, advanced, and changing the "Processor power management" section so that the min/max are 100% and, I suppose, the system cooling policy to Active so that it will be less apt to change the processor speed. If this works, then, at least in your case, there's a Windows-only method of working around the problem. I might even try it, but I've already reached my quota of one crash per day.

BTW, even with EIST enabled and using 5%/100%, I don't actually see my CPU speed budging from its nominal value of 3300MHz. Not that I'm monitoring it all the time, but you would think at idle that it would step down. Correction: I just had to use the right tool to see it, but it's working constantly. Most of the time, the CPU hangs at 1600MHz but shoots higher upon demand.

Originally posted by rseiler:

It might be fun enabling EIST (SpeedStep, for those wondering) again but then going into the active power plan, advanced, and changing the "Processor power management" section so that the min/max are 100% and, I suppose, the system cooling policy to Active so that it will be less apt to change the processor speed. If this works, then, at least in your case, there's a Windows-only method of working around the problem. I might even try it, but I've already reached my quota of one crash per day.

I had already set it at 100% (Power plan High Performance), and regarding c3/c6 i will confirm it.

I'm wondering why you all have those troubles on Win8. I'm using it on my laptop and on my desktop PC as the only operating system. And on both machines current Opera Next builds are my everyday browsers. I don't have any big problems with it. Neither on my desktop with HWA, WebGL, Websocket = 1 nor on my laptop (all three switched off).
I'm using the x64-builds on both systems...

Thanks for posting. I'm wondering too, believe me. Our only clue right now is EIST (SpeedStep) in the BIOS. Do you somehow have that disabled?

Periodically I add comments pro and con that I've seen in the blog:

@brianrourkeboll said "Opera seems to cause the entire OS to freeze/become unresponsive (it seems like it might possibly be a graphics problem, though, considering the visual artefacting?) on Windows 8."

I don't have that option on my laptop, but my AMD desktop-CPU has this option ENABLED! (slowing down from 3,2 GHz to 2,8 GHz)

Originally posted by christoph142:

I don't have that option on my laptop, but my AMD desktop-CPU has this option ENABLED! (slowing down from 3,2 GHz to 2,8 GHz)

Then i will check after enabling it again, if it freezes or not.

I disabled some power saving features in bios (c3/c6 power saving feature, EIST)

Opera uses ACPI incorrectly... On XP it makes the system clock run two times faster, on 8 it freezes with S3 on... these problems very probably have the same cause.

Interesting. So now S3 seems to be at play. I need a scorecard to keep these straight (not all features will be available to everyone, and phrasing diverges widely):

CPU EIST Function: Enables or disables Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST). Depending on CPU loading, Intel EIST technology can dynamically and effectively lower the CPU voltage and core frequency to decrease average power consumption and heat production.

C3/C6/C7 State Support: Allows you to determine whether to let the CPU enter C3/C6/C7 mode in system halt state. When enabled, the CPU core frequency and voltage will be reduced during system halt state to decrease power consumption. The C3/C6/C7 state is a more enhanced power-saving state than C1.

ACPI Suspend Type S3(STR): Enables the system to enter the ACPI S3 (Suspend to RAM) sleep state. In S3 sleep state, the system appears to be off and consumes less power than in the S1 state. When signaled by a wake-up device or event, the system resumes to its working state exactly where it was left off.

Confirmed in build 1406 (x86), fresh profile with just my bookmarks, wand, cookies, and a few other things copied over. It happened within a half hour of real use.

It's interesting to me how this problem has progressed. As can be seen in the top post, it used to be more of a soft freeze than a hard freeze. You still had to use the reset button, but you could limp around a bit before giving up. In the last few builds, however, it's a complete lockup. The time even stops.

I went into the BIOS and disabled "Processor C States," which is the Intel equivalent of C3/C6/C7 State Support. While it's awfully similar-sounding to EIST, I figured it was the least drastic change since EIST is still in effect (the processor speed still fluctuates). If you have to choose, I'm guessing it's the better choice. The help screen in the BIOS mentioned that disabling Processor C States also disables a separate option called "CPU Idle State," which is a toggle between High Performance (the OS is forced to use the Maximum Multiplier at all times) and Low Power (allows the OS to adjust the multiplier down).

After several hours no problems, though I'm not going to leave it this way since then we'll never know when this very real problem is fixed--or be able to identify any potential reasonable workaround in the OS or Opera. Also, these power-saving features are a good thing.

The vigil continues.

Thought for the day: Could out-of-process plugins be wrapped up in this issue? That sounds "low-level-y" to me, and they didn't exist in the stable 1325. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to disable that feature to test the theory.

Originally posted by rseiler:

I don't know of a way to disable that feature to test the theory.

No way to disable it.

But may be it is related to OOPP. I am still waiting for some Opera DEV reply about this issue.

FYI, I emailed DSK-361105@bugs.opera.com with updated information from the thread, so if Opera actually reads those they should be current on the situation. I also included a tinypaste of my system info, as created with Aida64, so they'll have lots of fine detail to look at should that be necessary, but I don't think this is really a system-dependent problem. Any remotely recent system should have the CPU features we're talking about, and very likely they're enabled by default. Starting in about 3 weeks with the Release Preview, people will increasingly also have Win8.

Confirmed in 1417.

Update:

nick_el_son said:
"Yeah, my system got frozen after half an hour I've installed this new build and I had to shut down pc manually and turn back on..
(Windows 8 CP X86, Opera X86, no HWA).

"I understand that Windows 8 is just at beta testing stage, but I'd be very grateful if anyone from Opera development team just test build on Win 8 too before releasing them ))."

Testing beta software on beta/preview software ?, Don't really see the point, Since both of them are going to change over the
coarse of the beta/preview phase. Best to wait till Win8 hits stable (cough)/retail before testing thoroughly, Otherwise you are
trying to hit a moving/changing target.

It's not moving that much, so it should be like hitting the side of a barn. There will be a grand total of two test releases this year. This isn't the old days where MS was pumping out new builds to the public ever week. Millions of people are already using it, and the near-final release candidate that looks and feels like a final will be out in a couple weeks and be used by many millions more. Let's reconvene then to see if it still gets blowed up real good by a Web browser.

OS's are always moving targets, with periodic service packs and frequent hotfixes that can change the OS at the kernel level overnight. Testing still needs to happen early and often.

So today i got some time to spend, guess what i think i have discovered exact cause of this problem.

-I enabled all the power features that i had disabled previously.
-Started Opera, and PC hangs after about 5 mins.

Restarted PC

-Disabled c3/c6 states (enabled all other features)
-Working fine now for about Half an hour!


For all those having problems with Opera, Try disabling c3/c6 power saving feature in bios, it might solve this problem.

Opera 12 (Dx 10 HW acceleration)
Windows 8 64bit
Sapphire 5750

EIST and/or C States (one person even tied it to S3). How is that new, as we've been talking CPU power functions in the BIOS for the last month (see posts on the 9th and 11th of this month in particular)? I'm certainly not changing the BIOS permanently to accommodate an application. We need to find a software workaround for this, like maybe disabling OOPP on the theory that it's responsible, to be able to move forward with Opera. The hail-Mary right now is that the Release Preview build in a couple weeks will magically fix it, but I highly doubt it.

I need to solve this issue since i use Opera 12 as main browser, so a temporary fix is needed until Opera role out a permannet fix.

Definitly we dont and we cannot know what is cause of this problem, until some Opera dev read this thread, but it seems like no body is interested.

Has this bug been fixed in the recent builds?

I was suspecting it has to do with how Windows 8 suspends all background apps, and somehow Opera gets trapped in that suspended state.

No. It still takes it down. Hard. As Opera (scarily, considering the number of major issues) rapidly approaches the RC phase (which usually lasts about 3 days), W8 Release Preview will be out anywhere between June 1st and 8th.

To my knowledge, W8 only suspends Metro-style apps, which Opera is not. When you enable the "Status" column in Task Manager, only Metro-style apps are listed as suspended in that column.

As Cristoph142 mentioned above, I have win8cp as my only system on my PC, and Opera is my primary browser of course, and I don't seem to have those problemes you have.
I checked the BIOS settings, and I've intel EIST ENABLED and C1 Enabled, but I don't seem to have C3/C6/C7 .. maybe because i'm not on a laptop !!! ( Intel Dual Core E5500 2.8 GHZ, Intel GMA 3100 : HA/WebGL off ).

for me, win8cp seems more faster and stable than win7 both x86 !

PS: I used win8cp since the first week it was released, and I uninstalled it only for 2 weeks and I reinstalled it again !! ( as I found the bugs in Opera are by far the same IMHO on both Operation systems)

regards !