<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'>----- Original Message -----<br>From: "Michael J. Hammel" <mjhammel@graphics-muse.org><br>To: "CLUE tech" <clue-tech@cluedenver.org><br>Sent: Monday, February 2, 2009 8:28:38 AM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain<br>Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Ubuntu lock-up problems<br><br>On Sun, 2009-02-01 at 18:55 -0700, Dennis J Perkins wrote:<br>> This might make the problem more tractable. Assuming it's not the<br>> kernel, I can try killing background processes and see if it still locks<br>> up.<br><br>System lockups cannot occur in user space. That's the design intent of<br>kernel vs user space. You can tell if its a user-level process (thus<br>knowing if killing it would help) by pinging the box after the lockup.<br>If it responds then the kernel is still running. If not, and you don't<br>have pings blocked on that box, then the kernel is locked up and killing<br>user space daemons may or may not have any affect depending on what<br>kernel drivers they interact with directly.<br><br>If you're lucky then an ssh or telnet session might still work after the<br>lockup, in which case its definitely video related on the laptop. I had<br>this sort of problem for a while last year using NVidia's drivers. The<br>newest open source drivers (or at least the stuff in Fedora's RPM Fusion<br>repositories) works fine now.<br><br>And you may still have a video driver loaded into the kernel even if X<br>is not running. The driver may be getting loaded to do some kind of<br>framebuffer interaction.<br><br>You might try booting some other LiveCDs with older kernels just to see<br>if anything boots and stays up. Try PuppyLinux (small kernel) or an<br>older Knoppix. Or some distro that doesn't do much in the way of video.<br><br>-- <br>Michael J. Hammel Principal Software Engineer<br>mjhammel@graphics-muse.org http://graphics-muse.org<br>------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br><br>Should not occur in user space. User-space interaction with a driver,
such as udev, might cause a lockup in a few cases. There are some
reports of problems with a wireless network driver locking things up,
and problems with the Radeon driver. I think the problem is with the
Xorg driver, but the kernel does have a Radeon module that I had
overlooked. I can see if that is loaded.<br>
<br>
The Arch Linux CD doesn't cause lockups. I would just install that and
be done with it, but I'm giving this computer to someone who has never
used Linux.<br>
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