Crashing with Dell

Matthias Heiler heiler at gmx.de
Wed Aug 24 09:49:37 UTC 2005


Matt Patterson <matt at v8zman.com> writes:

> Hard lockups are generally a hardware issue. Turn off graphics
> acceleration (and if you are using the nvidia binary drivers also
> disable the agp support). The ram is a good place to look as well, try
> running the memtest feature that is on the boot menu. I always start
> by pulling all unimportant cards (that includes pulling all but one
> memory stick) and all unimportant accessories and then seeing if I can
> reproduce the problem. Also see if there is a way you can cause the
> problem to occur regularly, like starting and stopping glxgears, or
> running the bonnie++ hard disk and io tests.

Just want to let you know that I had tried that (doing much IO, doing
graphics, changing graphics drivers and acceleration modes) with my
D610 and did not succeed making the problem appear deterministically.

Since Win works perfectly, I guess it's a strange timing/scheduling
error in the kernel.  The fact that moving from 2.6.10 to 2.6.12
improved the situation seems to confirm that.  (Note that the D610 has
a relatively new chip set and it's not unlikely that the kernel guys
have still some bugs sitting in their code.)

Unfortunately, I have no idea how one would debug such a problem: When
the machine locks, it locks completely.  No kernel messages, no error
screen, no ssh.  It's dead.

Yours,

  Matthias





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