[ltp] T20 occasionally locking up

[Thorsten Ohl]

My T20 (2647-44: 700MHz, 128MB, 12 GB, DVD, Intel PRO/100+)
occasionally locks up.  The symptons are that X will suddenly freeze,
followed by a final disk access.  Then the machine is completely
locked and responds neither to the network nor to any key on the
keyboard (the power/reset, thinklight and backlight buttons still
work).  After rebooting the machine, I can find no error message or
OOPSes in the log files.

This happens randomly a couple of times per week (with about 10 hours
of activity per day) and there _seems_ to be no correlation with the
number of suspend/hibernate/resume cycles or the PM settings. I have
the impression that the freeze is most likely to happen if there is
fast scrolling (e.g. in emacs, netscape or xterm), but this can be
just a reflection of my usage pattern.  On the other hand, it has not
happened yet when the machine was idle, playing MP3s, performing
numerical calculations or excessive network I/O.

The kernels are 2.2.16s: either vanilla or recently the 2.2.16+ that
comes with SuSE-7.0.  Everything else works fine (at the beginning I
had some trouble with the ALSA drivers but these were cause to bugs in
an obsolete set of modutils and my stupidity and have been overcome).
Using IO instead of MMAP in the eepro100 driver doesn't make a
difference.

I have run the included diagnostics on three DOS disks, but couldn't
find a hardware problem.  I know that the common wisdom for random
locks is `faulty hardware', but I know from my own experience (on my
Desktop machine) that buggy interrupt handling in a driver will
produce the same symptoms.  

Has anybody seen something similar?  Are there some printk()s that I
should enable to track the problem down?

Thanks,
-Thorsten
-- 
Thorsten Ohl, Physics Department, TU Darmstadt -- ohl@hep.tu-darmstadt.de
http://heplix.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de/~ohl/ [<=== PGP public key here]
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