[ubuntu] Unity freezes when switching from a tty

Hi everyone,

I recently installed Xenial on a used Thinkpad T420 I bought. On the whole I'm quite pleased with it, but I have noticed one thing that I find very annoying: occasionally, when switching from a tty back to graphics mode, Ubuntu will freeze up. It seems be more likely to happen if I have been working in the tty for some time. (I have only been using this laptop and 16.04 for two weeks though, so I have not yet discovered any other correlations.) A freeze usually lasts several minutes, and I have to reboot afterwards (or during, if I don't feel like waiting) in order to get Unity to run again.

The problem occurred again last night during a fairly typical use scenario: I was logged in on tty1,2,3 and 7 (tty7 being, as usual, the graphics environment). Emacs was running in tty1. I don't think I had any other programs currently running in any of the other ttys (though perhaps Thunderbird or Nautilus on tty7). I have posted the relevant extract from my syslog here. Unfortunately I cannot remember precisely when the freeze happened, but there is an error message by emacs that may be relevant at 00:25:35 in the log.

Previously I used 14.04, I never encountered the problem there. My guess is that this is some kind of a bug in Unity (or the X server?), but I don't really know how to diagnose it properly or where I should file a bug report. It is a pretty serious issue to me, as I do a fair amount of programming in a tty (minimal distraction with optimum screen real estate usage).

I would appreciate some advice on how to proceed from here, I'm kinda stuck at the moment...

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[ubuntu] Unity freezes when switching from a tty