Re: X freezes (was XMMS hanging system?)
Thus spake Karsten M. Self:
> on Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 09:22:57AM -0400, Steve Gran (gashuffer09@home.com) wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > I'm still trying to chase down some freezes on my box. For sake of
> > clarity, I'll try to give the relevant details all at once. About a
> > week and a half ago, I started having total lockups on my box while
> > running X. It's never happened outside of X, and at first it only
> > seemed to happen while I was also running XMMS (admittedly, I run it
> > quite often while I'm working). I tried removing XMMS, and it still
> > hung. The freezes are total, i.e., no keyboard access, mouse is
> > frozen, etc.
>
> How about networked access or serial port? If you don't have a network
> but do have a Palm or Handspring, get a terminal emulation package, run
> a getty on your serial port, and log in. Then try to replicate the
> crash and check for response.
>
> Good news is that a GNU/Linux crash almost always indicates a problem,
> usually hardware, some bad kernel drivers, or a bad X config.
>
> > Can't do anything except hit the reset switch. I'm keeping an eye on
> > the memory usage to see if that's the problem, although I have a fair
> > amount so it shouldn't be. Anyway, here are some details:
> >
> > uname -a
> > Linux gashuffer 2.4.7 #1 Tue Jul 24 14:29:31 EDT 2001 i686 unknown (running
> > woody)
> >
> > Box is a PIII chip, Via Apollo chipset on the board, hard drives, CD
> > Drive, SCSI CD Burner, USB interface for superdisk. Rage 128 video
> > card, SBLive sound card. Up until this I couldn't have been happier
> > with the setup[...] I have looked through the various /proc files, and
> > don't see any obvious interrupt conflicts or other such obvious clues,
> > and the various /var/log files also don't seem to have anything
> > obvious in them.
<cut>
> > Any ideas, as I'm running out? Memory usage does seem to be a bit
> > high (~148MB as of right now, but again, I have RAM to burn in there
> > from when a friend parted out an ex-graphics workstation. Thanks in
> > advance,
Hello again - I haven't been reposting about my freezes because I've been
chasing solutions on my own ;). The short version is it was the kernel -
kernel v. 2.4.7 has a problem with Via Apollo Pro chipsets (which I
conveniently have) and there is a memory leak, overflow, something that
I don't quite understand. At any rate, today I downloaded and installed
the latest kernel (2.4.9) and compiled and rebooted. Now it's running
like a dream, memory usage is where it should be, and it's good to have
a dependable box again. Thanks everybody for their help.
Steve
Oh - a note to others with similar problems - 2.4.9 no longer supports
drm for XFree 4.0.x (only 4.1), so you have to download the drm for 4.0.x
at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/drm-4.0.x.tar.bz2 and
replace the directory drivers/char/drm/ in the normal directory tree.
Good luck all,
Steve
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