XOrg freeze that affects a lot of people

[Xavier Bestel]

Le dimanche 20 mars 2005 à 14:53 -0500, Anton Markov a écrit :
> Jeremy Kolb wrote:
> > 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
> 
> I would agree that this is related to AGP or some other part of the 
> memory handling code. It appears to happen with programs that do lots of 
> drawing to the sreen. For example, scrolling in a browser, opening 
> KDevelop, Quanta, or another KDE application that appears to repaint the 
> toolbars a hundred times, etc. I also find that the crash is far more 
> likely to happen with xcompmgr running, which further suggests it has to 
> do with the image copying code.

Please note I had the same kind of problem in the past, and after
looking hard at the software level, I have finally found that some
capacitors on the motherboard were slowly dying. Under normal usage that
was not a problem, but under intense graphic operations the PCI timings
were a bit too much on the edge and a bus deadlock happened. At that
point the CPU has no access to the bus, so there's nothing a driver can
do. Replacing the capacitors made everything run smoothly again.

Points of the story: aggressive timings from the driver can reveal
faults from the hardware, and a hardware deadlock can be unrecoverable.

	Xav