Re: [gentoo-user] ~amd64 : X11 (?) crashing

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Sunday 15 November 2009 15:54:39 Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> Alan McKinnon schrieb:
> >> Sometimes my gnome-session (2.28) works for hours, sometimes for
> >> minutes.
> >
> > What happens when X crashes? Does the X session go away? Is there an
> > error message? Or does it just hang?
> 
> The whole X-session restarts, as if I do "xdm restart" or
> "ctrl-alt-backspace". I get back to the login-prompt of gdm.
> 
> No error message, I also browsed the xorg-logs, dmesg, /var/log/messages
> ... nothing related as far as I understand.
> 
> > Your symptoms as described are random, I find far more often than not
> > that is hardware, usually the power supply, ram and video card (in that
> > order)
> >
> > Give your hardware a thorough stress test, then only start playing with
> > downgrades
> 
> Hmm, I don't know ... why should a hardware-problem only shoot X11 ... ?
> It should crash then also when I dualboot windows xp for gaming (it does
> not crash there even under quite high gaming load).
> 
> OK, RAM might do that, I had a customers pc which rebooted (! reboot,
> not only kicking off one app) here and then because of defective RAM.
> 
> I start some memtest while having my coffee just to check that out for a
> start.
> 
> But I really assume some other reason, as I only recently went up to
> ~amd64 ... for me it is much more likely that maybe the step up to
> xorg-server 1.7.x or something related might be the reason here.
> bugs.gentoo.org didn't really list such a bug, maybe I should file one.
> But to me it seems a bit early as I can't reproduce it or really show
> some error-messages so far.

I still think a hardware stress test will be useful. The least that will 
happen is you will verify your hardware is probably OK.

If it is software, then you have a long road ahead of you debugging it. With 
no error messages of any kind you will likely have to rebuild in debug mode 
and provide the devs with a backtrace. In which case it's probably easier to 
downgrade to versions you know work.

I can attest to xorg-server-1.7.1 working just fine here with latest nvidia-
drivers in the tree on amd64

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com