lockups with radeon 8500

[Roland Scheidegger]

Paul Rudin wrote:
> Most opengl programs will run for a minute or two, then my whole
> desktop freezes up. The system is still up - I can ssh to it, but the
> console is completely unresponsive. Any tips for diagnosing and
> (hopefully) fixing the problem please? Here's my xorg.conf:
That's a classic gpu lockup.
Those are hard to debug. You can try upgrading to latest drivers
(dri/ddx/drm). You say "most" opengl programs - some specific ones which
run forever or crash fast? The 8500 in particular is a somewhat delicate
card (as opposed to 9000/9200), as it needs some driver workarounds for
hw bugs which are likely not quite done right in the driver under some
circumstances (though that shouldn't affect "simple" apps like quake3).
HW failure (either insufficient cooling or just bad hardware) is another
possibility (try other drivers / OS to rule it out).

Roland