[vox-tech] Crashing X (cool LCD effect :) )

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Tue 03 Feb 04,  4:13 PM, Bill Kendrick <nbs@sonic.net> said:
> 
> Melissa was doing something in Gimp last night (she was in the midst of
> cropping a single-layer scanned image) when suddenly her LCD screen
> looked like it was being microwaved or something.  (Looked kind of similar
> to what my Zaurus LCD does when it's shutting down for a reboot.)
> 
> I checked logs, and one of the results of these crashes seems to be
> some notifications regarding something called 'mtrr':
> 
> In /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog:
> 
>   Feb  3 06:03:57 hachinosu kernel: mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch [...]
>   Feb  3 06:03:57 hachinosu kernel: mtrr: detected mtrr type: Intel
 
bill, that is perfectly normal.  perfectly healthy.  there's no reason
to suspect that mtrr is to blame for the crash based on these logs.
 
> That's about all I could come up with (I'm also sick, tired, and low on
> blood sugar right now, so my brain's a bit slow)
> 
> The system is an IBM Thinkpad T-20.  lspci shows the video card as:
> 
>   01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: S3 Inc. 86C270-294 Savage/IX-MV (rev 11)
> 
> 
> XFree86 is version 4.2.1.1 (Debian 4.2.1-6 20030327121809...) from here:
> 
>   deb http://people.fsn.hu/~pasztor/debian woody xfree
> 
> 
> It's a Woody box running it's build of kernel 2.4.18-686.
> 
> 
> 
> One of the other causes she mentioned of the crash was using Gimp and
> movign a selection.  I've noticed on my own system that, under Gimp 1.2.3,
> sometimes the selection tool goes a little nuts.  It starts drawing
> XOR lines all over the place, and presumably some of them are extremely
> long.  When I see Gimp start to do that, I quit immediately and restart.
> If I don't, it can end up locking up X or crashing it.  Quite irritating. :^(
> 
> (I'm about to est a backport of Gimp 1.2.5 on my own system ;) )
> 
> 
> Anyway, what's "MTRR" and is it related?
 
take a look at my howto:

   /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/Linux-Gamers-HOWTO.gz

i explain it some there.  there's also

   /usr/src/linux/Documentation/mtrr.txt


done from memory; not sure if that is exactly correct, but it's
something like ~linux/Documentation/mtrr.txt.

 
> FYI, the XFree86 modules I'm loading are:
> 
>   extmod
>   record
>   xtrap
>   speedo
>   type1
>   dri
>   int10
>   vbe
>   glx
>   GLcore
>   wacom     [tho tablet isn't set up yet]
>
> 
> 
> The Savage device stanza is as follows:
> 
>   Section "Device"
>     Option     "SWCursor"     "true"
>     Option     "UseBIOS"      "false"
>     Option     "ForceInit"    "true"
>     Identifier "Card0"
>     Driver     "savage"
>     VendorName "S3"
>     BoardName  "Savage/IX-MV"
>     BusID      "PCI:1:0:0"
>     Option     "UseFBDev"     "true"
>   EndSection
> 
> 
> Ideas?  Suggestions?
 
there's no way to tell what happened based on this information.  clearly
SOMETHING bad happened, but if you can reproduce the problem, you'll
never know what it is (and can't give a bug report).

is there any reason to suspect that the problem was in user land rather
than kernel land?  i would guess it was probably an oops of some sort.

you can look in /var/log/ksymoops for any oopses, i believe.
instructions for reporting an oops is in
~/linux/Documentation/oops-tracing.txt.

btw, i just apt-get upgraded, and libc6 was upgraded (on woody).  since
then, gimp's screen shot acquire is totally buggy.  it captures the
wrong part of the screen ever since the libc6 upgrade.  maybe something
similar happened.

just graspin at straws...

pete

-- 
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.  -- Albert Einstein
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