Freezes on XPRESS 200M - how to debug?

[Daniel Klaffenbach]

Hi,

I am on a HP laptop (nx6125) with an rs480 chipset. Unfortunately I experience 
many hard freezes resulting in system lockups[*] when DRM and/or KMS are 
enabled.

I would like to debug this issue to provide some helpful information but 
unfortunately the system (not just X) always freezes completely. I am not even 
able to use an active SSH session to watch the system log files - as soon as 
the problem occurs the system does not respond to anything anymore.
In fact, it seems the system does not even get to the point of logging a crash 
because it is already frozen at that point.

Is there anyone who could point out how to get useful error messages or even 
backtraces in such a case?


- Dan

[*] Always using linux-git, mesa-git, libdrm-git, xf86-video-ati-git