Regarding freezing, possible work around?

[jhohertz]

I just recently put together a new system (AMD X2 3800+ w/ 8600 GT card, fedora 7) and found myself having lockups as others have been describing here w/ 100.14.xx and/or 8600 cards and/or fedora 7. (i came the way while googling for possible solutions). Yes, I have RenderAccel, Composite, AIGLX, beryl, etc on (hey... eye candy is fun).

The surefire way for me to trigger it was go into screensaver settings, and preview and switch around between some screen savers. It would wedge X, leaving the mouse to work. Occasionally (very occasionally) it would recover. In every almost instance however I could go SSH into my box, switch init from 5 to 3 and back, and get a fresh login screen. (i think it stopped working one time after the ~10th time during a long run of trying to tweak it)

I think, I may have found a work around however. It's not perfect.. i still see occasional pauses (it seems to be certain workloads, IE: some screensavers are more likely/consistently causing it to happen, i can click to the next and it eventually notices). But it's not hiting the "point-of-no-return" I was seeing before.

The workaround?

Now, I added a couple of things just as i saw it fixed, i'll describe them all, but I *think* it might have been using:

Option "UseEvents" "True"

.. that did it... i saw a lot of 100% CPU spinning in either X, or beryl, or even BOTH when I was looking at the system as it hung, making it feel like some kind of communications breakdown... this seems to cause the driver to employ a different communications method, and so might be side-steping the issue.

I also added this one to enable the clocking features in the panel, as apparently the card I got comes out of the box overclocked, and I was going to try clocking it back to spec.

Option "Coolbits" "1"

This option has been a part of my other AIGLX box (an older XP 1800+ w/ GeForce 3), and has been very reliable (and speedy! much faster than even late model MacOSX systems effects), so i threw it in.

Option "TripleBuffer" "True"

These are the only other options set, both happened as the driver was activated via the livna install.

Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"

I'd be interested in hearing if the switch to using events helps anyone else.

Cheers.

[jhohertz]

And so of course, right after, I posted, it wedged....

Xorg and beryl are spinning, and straces of them look like repeating sequences of:

For beryl:

I was seeing a lot of IO, it stoped making syscalls as I wrote this.

For Xorg:

--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 0}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [49])
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 20000}, it_value={0, 20000}}, NULL) = 0
read(49, ">\0\7\0\3\0\0\4=\0\200\3\2\0\0\4\37\1\325\0\0\0\0 \0\340"..., 4096) = 32
gettimeofday({1183503682, 391472}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1183503682, 391505}, NULL) = 0
read(49, 0x97c6ab8, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(44, [{"w\0\216\354\3\0\200\3|\4`\3\334\347P\216\315\0#\ 0\340\1"..., 5760}], 1) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(49, [{"\16D\255%=\0\200\3\0\0>\2$\255\302\t@\255!\10\2\ 0\0\300"..., 64}], 1) = 64
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 0}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [49])
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 20000}, it_value={0, 20000}}, NULL) = 0
read(49, ">\0\7\0\3\0\0\4=\0\200\3\2\0\0\4\34\1\330\0\0\0\0 \0\340"..., 4096) = 32
gettimeofday({1183503682, 491472}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1183503682, 491504}, NULL) = 0
read(49, 0x97c6ab8, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(44, [{"w\0\216\354\3\0\200\3|\4`\3\334\347P\216\315\0#\ 0\340\1"..., 5824}], 1) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(49, [{"\16D\257%=\0\200\3\0\0>\2$\255\302\t@\255!\10\2\ 0\0\300"..., 64}], 1) = 64
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 0}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [49])
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 20000}, it_value={0, 20000}}, NULL) = 0
read(49, ">\0\7\0\3\0\0\4=\0\200\3\2\0\0\4\31\1\333\0\0\0\0 \0\340"..., 4096) = 32
gettimeofday({1183503682, 591472}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1183503682, 591505}, NULL) = 0
read(49, 0x97c6ab8, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(44, [{"w\0\216\354\3\0\200\3|\4`\3\334\347P\216\315\0#\ 0\340\1"..., 5888}], 1) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(49, [{"\16D\261%=\0\200\3\0\0>\2$\255\302\t@\255!\10\2\ 0\0\300"..., 64}], 1) = 64
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 0}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [49])
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 20000}, it_value={0, 20000}}, NULL) = 0
read(49, ">\0\7\0\3\0\0\4=\0\200\3\2\0\0\4\26\1\336\0\0\0\0 \0\340"..., 4096) = 32
gettimeofday({1183503682, 691472}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1183503682, 691511}, NULL) = 0
read(49, 0x97c6ab8, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(44, [{"w\0\216\354\3\0\200\3|\4`\3\334\347P\216\315\0#\ 0\340\1"..., 5952}], 1) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(49, [{"\16D\263%=\0\200\3\0\0>\2$\255\302\t@\255!\10\2\ 0\0\300"..., 64}], 1) = 64
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 0}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = 1 (in [49])
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 20000}, it_value={0, 20000}}, NULL) = 0
read(49, ">\0\7\0\3\0\0\4=\0\200\3\2\0\0\4\23\1\341\0\0\0\0 \0\340"..., 4096) = 32
gettimeofday({1183503682, 791471}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1183503682, 791503}, NULL) = 0
read(49, 0x97c6ab8, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(44, [{"w\0\216\354\3\0\200\3|\4`\3\334\347P\216\315\0#\ 0\340\1"..., 6016}], 1) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
writev(49, [{"\16D\265%=\0\200\3\0\0>\2$\255\302\t@\255!\10\2\ 0\0\300"..., 64}], 1) = 64
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL) = ? ERESTARTNOHAND (To be restarted)
--- SIGALRM (Alarm clock) @ 0 (0) ---
setitimer(ITIMER_REAL, {it_interval={0, 0}, it_value={0, 0}}, NULL) = 0
sigreturn() = ? (mask now [])
select(256, [1 3 9 10 13 15 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 49], [44], NULL, NULL <unfinished ...>

[jhohertz]

Quick note, that it did come back, and as long as I don't ask much of it, it seems to work ok.

[jhohertz]

Wierd.... my experiences seem to contradict these:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=86253

[jhohertz]

Okay... here's the deal... I mentioned enabling the clock panel to set my speeds down.

My manufacturer clocked my G84 (-300? the GT part..) at higher speeds. 620/800.

Setting this down to 540/700 as speced by nvidia for the chip, the problems go away. (I have 16 screensavers in 2x2's across the 4 desktop cube faces, running smooth and reliable, and have been playing with the KVM features of F7 as it runs)

Now I just want to figure out how to tweak my card's bios to run at spec by default....

Boo to the manufacturer (XFX) for not at least burning in their pushed-spec cards in to catch when they've gone too far.