ATI-Drivers crash the whole machine

theomega

Hy,
I tried to install the ati-drivers on my System and it seems to work. glxinfo shows the correct Renderer and direct-redering is on. BUT: At random times my pc stops working, everthing hangs and nothing moves, the only solution is a reboot. The locks happen at normal Desktop-Work, so the Drivers 3D features aren't used (much). I try to provide as much information as I can, but if anything is missing please tell me. As the hardware-setup is running fine on Windows, I dont think its a hardware-failure, it must be a gentoo/linux issue. Everything is stable if I swich to the old radeon-driver, but I can't play UT2004 then

1. lmod (before starting the X-Server)

blacksadness · n00b Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 19 Location: Lebanon

it's working for me after i downgraded to the 2.6.14 kernel
how ever i don't know how related it is but i used to have it functioning perfectly on 2.6.15 with gcc 3.3 and it started having the problem after i reinstalled and upgraded to gcc 3.4.4
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theomega · Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:57 pm Post subject:

Hy,
thanks for the tipp, ill try downgrading, but are there any other tipps?

Thanks
TO

blacksadness · n00b Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 19 Location: Lebanon

just note that if gdm still crashes edit the /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf (not sure of the link i'm not on gentoo now) and force the server to restart each time you log out
you'll find it there in the file i don't know how to do it on kdm though if you use that
_________________
Unix Is The Worst Operating system Ever..
Except for all others ..

theomega · Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 9:51 pm Post subject:

Hy,
thanks for the tipp, but i neither use kdm nor gdm.
Anybody else knows a tipp?

Thanks
TO

theomega · Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2006 7:30 pm Post subject:

Hy,
a upgrade to the most recent kernel (2.6.15-r7) didn't make anything better. I also tried Using the Internal AGP and not but nothing helped. Does anybody know a tipp? I want to Play UT2004 *G*

Thanks
TO

RaZoR1394 · Guru Joined: 09 Jan 2005 Posts: 356

I have a similar problem. I'm using an ATI card together with the latest ati-drivers and the latest gentoo-sources. Since 2.6.14 or 2.6.13 got introduced I've had many lockups but they stepped down some months ago. Recently the lockups have started to happen very frequently. Opening a big openoffice document or rendering a page in Firefox could make the box lockup. This happen with both fglrx and radeon though. I've tried memtest86 for several hours and pushed the box pretty hard in Windows XP x64 so I'm pretty sure It isn't a hardware problem.

When does your system lockup at most, when using firefox, office programs, text editors or when doing nothing at all? If it lockups during webbrowsing try another browser. Also what does /var/log/messages say before that system lockups? Can you SSH into the machine from another computer? Have you tried the Sysrq trick? What window or desktop manager are you running?

Don't forget that there is a big thread about lockups above this one.

To be completely sure that you don't have a hardware problem I would try running Prime95 and memtest86. Memtest86 can be run from most linux livecds or the Ultimate boot cd. Prime95 runs on Windows. PI could another choise.

If Prime95, PI and Memtest86 passes without any problems I would try:

1. If you have an AGP card, disable fastwrites. Instructions can be found here
2. Try switching this option to the opposite: Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "on"
3. Check that you haven't configured the kernel wrong.
4. Try a very old kernel, for ex 2.6.12 and a very fresh one like 2.6.16-rc5.
5. Try an alternative kernel like ck, archck, nitro, vanilla and so on.
6. Try every ati-driver you can get a hold on.
7. Boot without frame buffer.
8. Disable drivers and options in the kernel one by one to rule out the faulty module.
9. Try a testing version of glibc. (not ~arch)
10. At last I would try to reemerge the whole system.

Admiral_Trigger_Happy · Guru Joined: 05 Sep 2004 Posts: 337 Location: Australia

I have a few crashes
When I log out of KDE, (using kdm) it will crash
When I upgraded to the 2.6.15-r1 kernel it will crash as soon as it boots up, listing some error in the fglrx module.

I downgrade my kernel back the old one and all works well.

I am using 8.22.5

I can't see any problems with my kernel config, it worked on the previos kernel (but configured from scratch
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RaZoR1394 · Guru Joined: 09 Jan 2005 Posts: 356

Admiral_Trigger_Happy · Guru Joined: 05 Sep 2004 Posts: 337 Location: Australia

Just did a couple of things and discovered some interesting things:

If X crashes, or fails to start correctly the fglrx driver from 8.22.5 will take out the kernel and my whole machine goes down.

I tried to test some changes in my Xorg.conf and they didn't work and X didn't start, CRASH!
Tried to stop x using /etc/init.d/xdm stop, CRASH!!

This is bad, has anyone found a solution?

Thanks
_________________
Admiral Trigger Happy
-------------------------------
www.kiba-dock.org

theomega · Posted: Sun Mar 05, 2006 1:18 pm Post subject:

Hy,
thanks for the many advices, but I want to point out some things:

1. The crashes I'm taliking about happen during the run of the X-Server not at the end. I had the problem with the hangs at the end of a X-Server-Session on another machine, but not on this one.
2. Disabling FastWrites in Bios and/or in the X-Server-Config didn't help
3. I don't use a framebuffer
4. I tried to use the Driver-Internal-AGP-Module but it fails because it doesn't recognize my chipset. The dmesg talks about setting "try_unsupported" to "1", but where can I try this?

Thanks
TO

theomega · Posted: Sat Mar 25, 2006 6:47 pm Post subject:

Just a little status-update:
After updating to Xorg 7.x and Kernel 2.6.16 everything works fine now. I don't know if the crashes went away due to the xorg-update or the kernel-update or if both played a role.

Thanks
TO