|
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
|
Re: [PLUG] what the hell is my computer doing?
|
Jeff Abrahamson wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 10:16:20AM -0400, Greg Lopp wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 09:40:21AM -0400, William Shank wrote:
> > > i'm running mandrake 8. i came in this morning and my harddrive is going
> > > nuts and the interface is completely unusable. it takes 5 minutes just to
> > > get the screen lock prompt to accept my password. i figure it was indexing
> > > the drive or something, but after a half hour it doesn't stop. i try to log
> > > in at another tty, but tire from waiting for the password prompt. also,
> > > there is an out of memory error and it says it killed a process (java -
> > > which is probably the Forte IDE i left running). i can't get the system to
> > > respond so i can see a process list. i finally try to reboot, (3 finger
> > > salute) but the system continues to hang attempting to shutdown. i finally
> > > have to reset it.
>
> I've had something like this happen to me twice on RH systems. I've
> never quite figured it out, but I found a couple things that were
> interesting:
>
> - apparently there was a late 2.2 kernel that still had a bug in
> it that could present this way.
>
> - some netscape versions have been known to go wild and hog cpu, but
> not quite as bad as you describe
>
> - on rare occasion (happens to me about twice a year) XFree86
> dies. When this happens, it's bad, and the hole machine appears
> frozen, although I can usually ssh in from another machine.
Having done some XFree86 development, I've seen this last case in a
couple forms. The classic 'hard lock' (machine locked, no remote access
of any kind) can occur when the video driver is buggy or not yet 100%.
S3 cards are know to have more issues with this than some other
vendors. It can be application dependent. Applications have different
mixes of graphics operations, and the video driver can work fine for
applications that don't use a buggy graphics op. But try an application
that uses the buggy op and you'll see a lockup at some point.
The less severe case, when you can still remote attach, happens when the
keyboard/mouse event handler dies or gets lost. Then even the
Ctl-Alt-F1 won't get you back to the text console, because all input is
blocked. It's not very common, and I can't say why this happens, but if
you have any detail about when it occurs I'd send a bug report to
xfree86@xfree86.org.
>
> That's a very long "I don't know", but fwiw.
>
> Ultimately, top would be a useful tool. If it happens often enough,
> maybe you could leave top running in a script session so you could
> play it back after reboot.
--
Kevin Brosius
______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group - http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements-http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mail/listinfo/plug
|
|