XOrg freeze that affects a lot of people

[Jeremy Kolb]

The problem stems from something weird with AGP.  I had to set my AGP to 
2x in my bios.  Since then, no crashes.  It's been happening for at 
least the past 3 or 4 nvidia driver versions.

Jeremy


Charles Goodwin wrote:
> There is an XOrg freezing problem that is afflicting a _lot_ of people.
> 
> The typical symptom is that when using Firefox the screen will freeze
> although the mouse cursor will still move.  However, it's not limited to
> Firefox, having experienced it with gvim myself and seen multiple (but
> less numerous) reports of the issue when using Opera and Konqueror.  (A
> little strange that it's mainly browser usage that induces the freeze.)
> 
> You can still ssh in and kill X to recover the computer sans rebooting.
> 
> It has been reported with XFree86 too.
> 
> The problem is in fact driver related.  It afflicted me when I upgraded
> to the most recent (7167) proprietary nvidia drivers, and downgrading
> fixed things for my desktop.  Many of the sufferers use Ati cards and
> there appears to be no standard version of the Ati drivers that works,
> much more problematic than the nvidia drivers where version prior to
> 7167 seem to have generally been stable for the majority of users.
> 
> It seems to be limited (from what I've seen) to the 2.6 Linux kernel.
> 
> Why is this really relevant to XOrg?
> 
> Well, I described the high-level symptom.  The low level symptom is that
> a message not dissimlar to this occurs in /var/log/everything/current:
> 
> Mar 18 12:50:48 [kernel] NVRM: Xid: 13, 0000 02005600 00000056 00000c28
> 01be0078 00000080
> 
> And instantly XOrg freezes and consumes 99% of the CPU.
> 
> I'm just curious as to whether it might be possible for XOrg to catch
> whatever-the-problem-with-the-driver-is and gracefully handle it.  If
> this were possible, even if X were to exit and give a nice error which
> could be used to debug the situation (by reporting the error to the
> driver developers), it would save a lot of pain for a lot of people.
> Most users are left having to do a hard reboot (since a lot of new Linux
> users are tech savvy enough to use ssh) and many get disillusioned and
> end up going back to whatever-OS they used before.
> 
> Sources:
> 
> * Official nvidia forum thread on the issue with the latest drivers:
>     http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=47502
> 
> * Gentoo forum threads (to illustrate the wide-reaching base of people
>   affected by this problem:
>     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-198023.html
>     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-231134.html
>     http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309020.html
> 
> I could dig up endlessly more links on complaints about this.  The only
> solutions I've ever seen are to upgrade or downgrade to driver x.y.z or
> to disable RenderAccel in xorg.conf.  I also believe this problem comes
> in more guises, having seen more varied issues reported as being fixed
> by these solutions.  Also, this is a problem that has been ongoing for
> (at least) up to a year, judging by the reports I've come across.
> 
> I know this is all a bit vague, but it's difficult to give any kind of
> info other than the experience / solution(s) unless it's actually
> happening to a developer.
> 
> - Charlie
> 
> Charles Goodwin <charlie at vexi.org>
> 
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