concerning X freeze recurring

[Adam Jackson]

Sam Folk-Williams wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> About once a day my system randomly freezes while running X (gnome). I
> am not sure what debugging info to collect at this point, here are some
> details:
> 
> -This is a t42 thinkpad
> -I am running rawhide updating every day
> -this started happening about 10 days ago and just happened today again
> -it happens about once per day
> -it does not seem to matter what applications are running
> -it usually happens while i am moving the mouse
> 
> The screen completely freezes and the system does not respond to
> anything. You can't go to any vtys, and I don't think you can SSH in
> although I don't often have another system to try this with. The only
> thing to do is a hard reset. I thought maybe the system was panicking,
> so I set up kexec/kdump. But the freeze does not trigger a boot into the
> kdump kernel, so I suspect it's just frozen not actually panicked.
> 
> Anyone else seeing this? Any suggestions for what to do to collect debug
> info?

Figure out a reliable way to get debugging information out of the 
machine when it's in this state.  We used kdb at my last job, but 
upstream kernel is all LA LA LA REAL MEN DON'T USE DEBUGGERS so the odds 
of getting that into the Fedora kernel is, shall we say, low.

There's probably some kernel voodoo already available between the 
various watchdog timers and netdump, but you'd need to also wire up some 
way to dump the video card's state.  That's code that has yet to be written.

- ajax