Re: Diagnosing infrequent X server crashes

Simon Brooke wrote:

I'm running Ubuntu 7.1 on a dual processor Athlon with a Radeon 9200 Pro
graphics card. I'm running the xorg X server:

ii xserver-xorg 1:7.2-5ubuntu1 the X.Org X server

I'm getting infrequent crashes which lock up the X server completely. I
can get in underneath by secure shell from other machines, and almost
always find that X is consuming virtually all the available processor
resource. Killing the X process usually (but not always) causes the screen
to clear and the window manager (KDM) to relaunch. Sometimes, although I
see KDM restart in 'top', the screen remains frozen and I have to hard
reset the machine.

I don't run a lot of graphics heavy programs, although I do play both Sid
Meier's Alpha Centauri and Neverwinter Nights (both native Linux versions,
and, yes, both legitimately paid for). At first I thought my intermittent
crashes were related either to OpenGL (mesa) or else to SDL

ii libgl1-mesa-dri 7.0.1-1ubuntu3
ii libgl1-mesa-glx 7.0.1-1ubuntu3
ii libglu1-mesa 7.0.1-1ubuntu3
ii libsdl-gfx1.2-4 2.0.13-3

However, the crashes happen even if I don't use any open gl or SDL based
programs. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to when they occur. I've
tried all of the 'ati', the 'radeon' and the 'fglrx' drivers. None of them
are reliable, but none of them crash very often.

Any suggestions as to how I might diagnose what's going on? I have an
NVidia card I could use instead of the radeon, but I swapped it out
because I was fed up with problems with the NVidia drivers.


The thing that worked for me about six months ago was updating the BIOS on
my motherboard to the latest version, don't know if it has anything to do
with your problem but the symptoms look similar although I'm using an
NVidia card.

--

Geoff Registered Linux user 196308
Replace bitbucket with geoff to mail me.
.

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