Kevin Brosius on 12 Aug 2004 11:25:03 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] what the hell is my computer doing?


Eduardo Pérez wrote:
> 
> On 2001-08-30 08:56:28 -0400, Kevin Brosius wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Do you know how to regain control of the computer once this happens?
> I have a MGA G550 with DRI enabled and sometimes mostly when a 3D app is
> running it hardlocks. I still can access by ssh but I don't know how to
> regain control. Do you know?
> 
> Eduardo

You can try killing X and restarting it.

Easiest way is often to take the system from runlevel 5 to runlevel 3
(or whichever runlevels your distro uses for 'graphical X' environment
vs. 'console only' environment).  On SuSE systems, I would log in as
root, 'telinit 3', wait and see if the console comes up.  If not, you
probably have to reboot.  You could check ps for a still hanging around
instance of X, and try kill first, then kill -9 on it.  If those don't
work, then I think only a reboot will recover it.  Report the bug to
whomever shipped your xfree86 video driver.

-- 
Kevin Brosius
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