[clue-tech] Ubuntu lock-up problems

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Sun, 2009-02-01 at 18:55 -0700, Dennis J Perkins wrote:
> This might make the problem more tractable.  Assuming it's not the
> kernel, I can try killing background processes and see if it still locks
> up.

System lockups cannot occur in user space.  That's the design intent of
kernel vs user space.  You can tell if its a user-level process (thus
knowing if killing it would help) by pinging the box after the lockup.
If it responds then the kernel is still running.  If not, and you don't
have pings blocked on that box, then the kernel is locked up and killing
user space daemons may or may not have any affect depending on what
kernel drivers they interact with directly.

If you're lucky then an ssh or telnet session might still work after the
lockup, in which case its definitely video related on the laptop.  I had
this sort of problem for a while last year using NVidia's drivers.  The
newest open source drivers (or at least the stuff in Fedora's RPM Fusion
repositories) works fine now.

And you may still have a video driver loaded into the kernel even if X
is not running.  The driver may be getting loaded to do some kind of
framebuffer interaction.

You might try booting some other LiveCDs with older kernels just to see
if anything boots and stays up.  Try PuppyLinux (small kernel) or an
older Knoppix.  Or some distro that doesn't do much in the way of video.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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