how do I debug the intel video driver?

[piotr5]

there is a strange behaviour on my inspiron1090:

when I load the i8k module, my display will crash at a random time, maybe days or weeks later. when I had this module not in my conf.d the display never crashed. I remember in ubuntu also at random time the display would crash, but no dataloss happened there because ubuntu mysteriously caught the crash and restarted the display without logging me out. any possibility to do the same in gentoo? any idea how I can get more info on the crash?

last time the crash happened the symptoms were: the touchpad worked, but pressing a button did not change what gets displayed. the display was frozen except for the mouse-pointer. switching to console made the pointer disappear and never come back again. had to restart my computer as it did not respond to any keypresses. any idea what I should do next time it happens?

and please no "post your logfiles", I would like to handle this myself. I can read my own logfiles very well, thankyouverymuch. I'm asking because maybe someone has some ideas or has already heard of that problem on dell duo. and needless to say, without i8k there is no good fancontrol and the computer overheats during summer...

[Ant P.]

You should have no problem figuring this out from dmesg. Good luck.

[piotr5]

lol, /var/log/everything is more useful when the screen doesn't display any changes at all. but I tried both, there are absolutely no log-messages related there. today (this is the 2nd crash since my previous posting) I noticed shortly before the crash there was a message from cron. coincidence? guess I'll have to wait for the next crash...