Crashing with Dell

[Matt Patterson]

I had the exact same problem with my system, hard lockups. I have a dual 
athlon though, and I had a hint, no lockups when using a single 
processor kernel, and distortion in the sound when heavy graphics were 
displayed on one of hte monitors (I had 1 agp and 1 pci video card). In 
the end it was the pci video adapter. If I disabled all devices but that 
adapter (and tried many pci adapters, including the onboard one) I would 
get lockups, without it no lockups. I upgraded to a dualhead nvidia agp 
card, everything works like a chamop now.

The system had been running windows server 2003 for a year with no 
problems before my switchover, so definitely something directly linux 
related, but hardware as well.

Matt



Matthias Heiler wrote:

>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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