lockups with radeon 8500

[Paul Rudin]

Roland Scheidegger
<sroland at tungstengraphics.com> writes:

> 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). 

I have the lastest from debian unstable.

> You say "most" opengl programs - some specific ones which
> run forever or crash fast? 

Well - all the ones I've tried exhibit this behaviour, and none run
forever. Because of the lock ups I've not tested extensively, but
certainly googleearth, blender and amaya cause the problem.


> 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).

This card worked fine under Windows for gaming, admittedly in a
different system, so conceivably it's hardware, but I doubt it. 

TBH, I don't especially need anything very fast for this machine, so
if the problem isn't easily fixable I might just buy a cheap, somewhat
more recent card.