[ltp] Its not heat, its not memory... what is it?

[David A. Desrosiers]

> Anyway, I think it's more than likely your graphics card drivers. 
> Could you be a bit more specific about what causes it to lock up, or 
> is it entirely random?

 	Nothing in kernel-land should cause a hardware lockup. A 
kernel crash, yes. A lockup, absolutely no way. That being said...

> Have you checked all your logs for various things and stuff? dmesg 
> etc..?

 	Yes, nothing at all out of the ordinary, and I log pretty 
pendantically as part of my development work anyway on this machine.

> If it's an ati graphics card on that model, make sure you're using 
> the open source drivers and not the proprietary ones, ati make 
> rubbish drivers for Linux.

 	I'm using the 7/20/2005 CVS tree of Xorg/Mesa/r300/drm. It is 
the only version of this driver that works properly with DRM. Anything 
else and I get pathetic fps.

> What distro are you using? What kernel etc? I don't think you can 
> call it a hardware issue until you're using something really rock 
> solid like Debian woody with a 2.4 kernel.

 	2.6.12.4, 2.6.12.5 on Debian Unstable/Experimental most of the 
time. I could certainly try a 2.4 kernel, but I seriously suspect that 
as being the problem.

 	I don't use distro kernels, so any wacky Debian-broken patches 
are out of the equation here. I've tried all three elevators, changing 
mtrr and some other related pokes, all to no avail.

 	I'll try chasing down the video driver issue a bit more and 
see if I can really exclude that from the issue.

 	If it was a video driver though, I'd expect it to lock up 
under a _much_ more intense GL application than these two examples.


David A. Desrosiers
desrod@gnu-designs.com
http://gnu-designs.com