[gentoo-user] Questions about the magic Sys Req keys

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Howdy,

I just had a hard lock up.  I had a random reboot the other day while I 
was sleeping as well.  This was with gentoo-sources 2.6.39.  I'm not 
sure what caused the one the other day but I had several days of 
uptime.  The one I just had was also after a few days of uptime.   I was 
logged into KDE when EVERYTHING froze.  The mouse pointer wouldn't 
move.  The clock stopped.  The numlock light wouldn't even change when I 
hit the key for it.  So, X was locked up pretty good.  I also couldn't 
switch to a console either.  This is the odd part.  I tried to use the 
magic Alt SysReq keys to at least try to get a reasonable shutdown.  
They didn't work either.

So, my question is this.  What kind of lock up could keep the magic keys 
from working?  This is on my new amd64 machine.  It was totally stable 
until the kernel upgrade.  I think this could be a kernel issue.  I 
booted a older kernel and will test it for a few days but wanted to know 
what kind of lockups could keep the magic keys from working.  After the 
hal/xorg deal, we all know how I hate hard resets.  ;-)

Thanks much.

Dale

:-)  :-)