Re: Help needed, TDFX [Re: Release-critical Bugreport for March 23, 2001]
On Sat, 24 Mar 2001 02:06:40 -0800
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 03:15:25PM -0800, Alexander Hvostov wrote:
> > I have this problem too. After a while, X freezes while running _any_ OpenGL
> > application. This means blender, GL screen savers, GL xmms plugins, etc.
>
> I'll assume you're running XFree4 since you didn't say otherwise.
Correct.
> X freezes like this for me quite frequently. Branden claimed it was a
> kernel bug some months ago, but that was fixed and it still dies. A
> number of things cause it, but I never knew DRI to be one of them.
> Mozilla caused my uptimes to be measured in hours rather than weeks under
> recent XFree4 packages. With my new card (ATI Radeon) it's changing video
> modes (which anyone who has seen me work in X knows I spend 30% of my time
> in 640x480 or lower due to unreadably small, aliased fonts in things like
> Netscape..)
>
> The problem seems to be in short that damned near anything will cause X to
> lock up and stop responding. A suggestion to make your life a little
> easier is to renice XFree86 to 0. For some reason it gets -10 by default
> amd that's just pleading for a lockup to down the box if you don't have a
> convenient box to ssh in and fix it.
Ouch. I only get trouble with DRI applications. X behaves quite nicely with
anything else (shm, dga, or regular X).
> > The only way to recover from this is to login to the machine over the network,
> > kill -9 X, and restart it (which, in my case, is done by gdm). However, doing
> > this causes the text mode console to become totally screwed up; attempting to
> > switch to the console works except that the display is still in graphics mode
> > (with whatever X drew on the screen). This display doesn't get repainted,
> > since all the software (the kernel and X) thinks the display is in text mode,
> > but it really isn't. Switching back to X works fine though (ie, it repaints
> > the screen and otherwise behaves normally).
>
> You can fix this by using the framebuffer console for your card. Except
> that most framebuffer drivers are not quite stable (like XFree4 it would
> seem) and very slow.
>
>
> > For this reason, I've disabled DRI on my system until this problem gets fixed.
> > It would be nice to have it fixed, since applications like blender get really
> > slow without it...
> >
> > My hardware is a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee. The chip is 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee,
> > PCI revision 3, part/serial/whatever number CT6760, 16 MB SDRAM on-board. It's
> > attached to PCI (as you might have guessed).
> >
> > Because the freezes seem totally unpredictable (except of course that a GL
> > application is running at the time of the freeze), I find this bug difficult
> > to reproduce.
>
> I can reproduce it with XawTV, Ctrl-Alt-Grey+, and any DRI app which uses
> the VidMode extension. I can also do it with anything that creates shaped
> windows frequently (the OSD plugin for XMMS for example or some window
> manager themes) In short, it's really easy to get X to freeze.
Again, I have no trouble with anything other than DRI. Since I've disabled DRI, X
doesn't do anything out of the ordinary here.
Regards,
Alex.
Reply to: