XOrg freeze that affects a lot of people

[Randall Nortman]

On Sun, Mar 20, 2005 at 03:13:12PM -0500, Michel D?nzer wrote:
[...]
> > >> 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.
> > 
> > Yes, the ATI drivers have been suffering from this problem to a varing 
> > degree since at least Xorg 6.8 (that's when I started using Xorg).
> 
> It's very unlikely the same issue in both drivers though. And as has
> been pointed out several times already in this thread, issues that are
> specific to drivers that don't ship with X.org are off topic here.

FYI: I have the same symptom (not necessarily the same problem) with
the open-source radeon driver shipped by X.org.  (I have not tried
reducing the AGP bus speed, but I will.)  I think the issue here isn't
about specific bugs in specific drivers, but rather about modifying
the base code such that driver and hardware bugs are easier to
diagnose.  Of course, that's easier said than done, and I don't know
enough about the code to comment on whether or not it is feasible.  It
seems to me that if Alt+SysRq isn't working, then there's pretty much
nothing that x.org can do, short of moving more functionality out of
kernel mode and into userland, which I'm sure has its own penalties.

Randall