Re: that X/Gnome lockup thing. How to trace it?

[John Gotts <jgotts ww2 tqstats com>]

In message <3963F3EF.ADD3A1F7@ukans.edu>, Paul E Johnson writes:

>In my local Linux user group, I mentioned that my RH 6.1 system was
>locking up. I'd never had a lockup in linux for 3 years, until Gnome
>1.2.1 made its appearance.  Several people chimed in with the same
>complaint.  Then I put it together with the mentions of lockups in this
>list and I started to wonder if the problem might be widespread.

>The symptom as I see it is that the system locks up suddenly, nothing
>works. The mouse does not respond, Alt-control-backspace does not work. 
>A reset button is the only solution.  I've associated the problem with
>heavy RAM usage, when the RAM and swap are near full.

>This problem happened to me only on a P-166 with 64 meg RAM. I do not
>see it on other systems that have 128 and 256 meg ram, respectively.

>After restarting, I do not find any core file to backtrace or any other
>hint to explain what went wrong.

>I was not sure it was a gnome problem, until several people claimed they
>switched back to KDE or dumped gnome in favor of nothing and then the
>problem went away.

The CD properties applet freezes my system, since it periodically forces a
reload of the IDE driver and a bus rescan to check for the presense of a
CD-ROM.

Once I turned that feature off, my GNOME system became rock solid.

But I guess the IBM IntelliStation is a bit odd because it's a SCSI system with
a cheap IDE CD-ROM thrown in almost as an afterthought.  Not so good for such a
high-end system (mine is about a year old and is an SMP Pentium III 500).

John

--
John GOTTS <jgotts@linuxsavvy.com>  http://www.linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts