[plug] strange happenings - advice needed

[Peter Wright]

Hi Jason,

On Fri, Dec 01, 2000 at 08:38:35AM +0800, Jason Nicholls wrote:
> G'day People,
> 
> Recently my system has begun to do strange things and I'm trying to
> narrow down the problem. In my opinion it is likely to be the video card.
> Here are the symptoms:

[ snip symptoms ]

> 4. 2 complete system lockups (ie: frozen solid)

Ohhhhh yeah, I got this. None of the other listed problems, but a definite
yes on this :).

It's almost getting routine for me. Running (large, potentially
memory-leaking?) apps such as mozilla (either built from cvs or M18),
StarOffice 5.2 - even konqueror (KDE file manager/browser).... after some
length of time X will just "freeze". If I leave the machine for a few hours
with (for example) StarOffice running, it's pretty much guaranteed I'll
come back to it and it'll be frozen - ie. nothing happening on display, no
response to keyboard input.

I have several machines on my home network, and once X has frozen on my
main machine (chef) I won't be able to make any network connections to it.
However, if I have a (for example) a telnet connection already up to chef,
I can use it to do a "top" and see that X is taking 99.9% of the CPU (dual
CPU machine, if it matters). Killing the X process (with kill -9) will
still not rescue the display on chef though - it won't respond to any
keyboard input. I have to reboot.

> I've checked the integrity of relevant packages such as X and found no
> problems. One thing that IS common is the GL aspect of things. The X
> server will segfault after loading the glx module and both Q3 and
> xmame.xgl are GL games. Note that I haven't touched my GL stuff for quite
> a while.
> 
> Note, while writing this I did a kernel compile without problems too.
> 
> What do people think?

My problem _may_ be related. My XFree86 4.0.1 was compiled from source, and
I use a NVidia/TNT2 graphics chipset with their kernel driver and XFree86
glx module. As Anthony suggested my problem may be something to do with
that, I'll have to look it up. Are you using an Nvidia chipset (and their
driver) too?

> Later,
> Jason Nicholls

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

--
Your mouse has moved.  Windows must be restarted for the change
to take effect.  Reboot now?