Re: system freezes with firefox on athlon64

[David Garamond <lists@zara.6.isreserved.com>]

Mitchell Laks wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 July 2005 09:42 am, David Garamond wrote:
> 
>>Dear all,
>>
>>I'm having a repeatable system freezes with Firefox 1.0.4 on my new
>>system (Athlon64 3000+, Abit AV8, Sarge/Sid mix). By freeze I mean
>>screen, keyboard, and mouse pointer suddenly stop responding (and no
>>lights at all on the keyboard LEDs, even when Caps Lock etc are
>>pressed). If some audio happens to be playing (e.g. juk) it will
>>continue to play until the current song is finished. I will then have to
>>press the Reset button to recover.
> 
> I am curious. It seems you can reproduce the problem. Is it X that is hanging.   
> Can you ssh into  your box, run top and see if XFree86 is running 99.9 % of 
> cpu usage? just an idea - also what is your video card on the machine? 
> 
> If so, try to kill -9  the XFree86 process and then you can do remote reboot. 
> let me know what you find.
> mitchell

You hit the nail on the head, it was X that was hanging. The XFree86 was
 eating CPU like you said and "killall -9 XFree86" recovered the machine
by returning me to the GDM login dialog box.

My video card is GeForce2 MX 400. I have replaced the "nv" driver with
"nvidia" and the freezes are now gone. I'm back a happy man.

Thanks!

Regards,
dave