Dell XPS laptop ATI mobility 9800

[Andrew Couture]

Hello,

equipment - Dell XPS 1gig ram ATI mobility 9800
-FC3 kernel 2.6.10 Xorg 6.8
-Gentoo kernel 2.6.10 Xorg 6.8

I have installed FC2, FC3 and Gentoo on this laptop. Currently hda1,2,3
are Gentoo and hda4 is FC3. On the gentoo side, I have the ATI vendor
drivers installed and am running at 1920X1200 with nice 3d. The FC3 side
is using the xorg 'radeon' driver.

This system locks up on two different but repeatable events.
-one is resizing, or selecting window box or selecting an item
-second, running one, two or three sessions of glxgears (fastest to a
freeze)

First, the fan picks up speed, then the desktop stops updating. The
keyboard does not respond to 
control,alt,backspace,
control,alt,delete
control,fn,f1,f2,f3
control,f1,f2,etc
caps
fn,break
only the 'big power button' stops the freeze.

I am able to ssh into the box (FC3) from my desktop, and I was watching
'top'.
The 'X' process runs from 1.5%-3% all the way to 99.9% back down to 3%
then spikes back to 99.9%, then it generally locks up.

When it locked up on me two nights ago, I just left it alone. In the
morning, the display on the laptop was updating (time was right) but
the glxgears display was frozen and the terminal complained about " X
error -81'. I closed the terminal looked at the logs, found nothing,
then rebooted to Gentoo to try and do some work.

Earlier last evening, I read the guide for X-server debugging. The twist
is, I don't think it is crashing. Left alone (for how long?) it comes
back up. 
I have not modified the FC3 kernel from stock so I will test on it.
>From my desktop, I ssh'd into the laptop and started gdb as root on the
Xorg file. The system did not freeze. The 'x' process pid showed 99.9%
use for the duration of the testing. However, after I closed out the
gdb , the system froze. I repeated the test. After some time the
external usb wheel mouse turned off, but the laptop stick and pad
continued to work. I unplugged the usb mouse, reinstalled it and it
worked again. All the things I have done before to freeze the system had
not worked. The gdm was still running.
The next test, I removed the external usb mouse and let it run hard and
it finally froze. The display, pad, stick and keyboard were not
responding.I plugged in the external usb mouse and the port had no
power. I tried to ssh a new instance into the laptop and it complained
'No route to host'. Sadly this stayed frozen overnight. The gdm shell
said "Read from remote host xps.relicsrage: No route to host
Connection to xps.relicsrage closed." 

I checked /proc/bus/input/devices, and it shows one keyboard and one
mouse (until I add the external usb mouse). The xorg.conf file shows the
mouse using IMPS/2 as a device. The dell handbook calls the pad 'touch
pad' and the stick 'track stick'. Both Gentoo and FC3 provide drivers as
'mouse'. Should these be something else? eg synaptic? or something
similar? Why does the laptop run longer when gdm is running on
it?  ...help....suggestions please.