[plug] SUSE 10.3 HANGS hard - or Windows-like behaviour from Linux ....

[Bernd Felsche]

Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au> wrote:

>I'm running OpenSUSE 10.3 on my machine and I have been getting
>problems. The whole machine hangs such that I cannot ping it from
>elsewhere and ALT + CTRL + Fx doesn't do anything.

How about the power button interrupt to shutdown/restart?

>Basically soon after a boot, it just hangs - I thought it was Firefox,
>but, not restarting FF doesn't stop the hangs, it does delay them.
>Starting up and signing on to Evolution also causes the same hang, but
>today I went away for at least 5 hours and got back and my machine was
>hung.  

>Anybody have any ideas how to
>     1. decide which app is doing it
>     2. why the kernel seems to hang
>     3. WTF is going on ....

First; memtest.

Next, boot in "Fail Safe" mode which is almost conservative in the
extreme about how the kernel talks to the hardware.

Add the "irqpoll" kernel command-line option at boot time.
Add a "3" to boot without GUI; worthwhile if you're uncertain about
the graphics chip.

The irqpoll option seems to work well with a lot of hardware that I
deal with in which interrupts just seem to get lost. NVidia chipsets
seem more prone than AMD when there's an AMD processor.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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