Help diagnosing a lockup

[Gene Smith]

Federico Tello Gentile wrote, On 11/06/2004 12:07 PM:
> I have used in this machine Fedora core 2 and RHL9 and every once in a
> while I experience a lockup. The mouse pointer disappears, the
> keyboard lights don't switch, everything looks freezed. I can only
> hard reset the machine.

I assume crtl-alt-bspace does not work either to restart X?
Can you access the locked machine with another computer using telnet or 
ssh or vnc? That would indicate just X is locked.

> This has happened with RHL9 and with FC2 with the default kernel and
> with kernels compiled by myself (kernel.org official kernels unpatched
> but I manually remove unneeded options).
> It has happened while connected to the net (dial up) and when not
> connected. When using some application and when using others.
> I have looked in the kernel log and all seems normal (no oops no
> panic) until it jumps in the timestamp to the moment I rebooted.
> I need help diagnosing the reason for this.
> The lockup happened twice one day, but it has been time where in a
> week or 2 it has not happened.
> I waited a while to see if it comes back, but it does not. I removed
> some cron tasks, but it happened again.
> Is there any driver that can cause this? I have some "unpopular" hardware.
> My video card is old (Diamond Steath 64 DRAM PCI) I think it is using
> the VESA driver. I have an internal ISA modem (USRobotics FAXMODEM
> Voice  V.90) that I use as a regular serial port (it is not detected
> as a PnP card, but I point the system-config-network as /dev/ttyS2 as
> a serial port and it dials).
> It is a Soyo 7VBA motherboard, with a P3 1 Ghz 256 MB RAM. It has
> happened with and without the USB device enabled from the BIOS setup.

I have been having similar problems with stock nvidia "nv" driver and 
went to "vesa" instead and have yet to see a problem in 2+ weeks. Just 
can't get 1184x864 res anymore just 1024x768. You can check to make sure 
vesa driver is selected by looking in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

> 
> It has always happened while I was working at it, that is moving the
> mouse, never when I leave it playing music or just turned on but not
> sitting at it.

Mine would lock when starting an action with the mouse, not just moving 
the mouse I think.

> Can it be a mouse driver issue? I have a Genious NetScroll (with
> wheel) but I have to use it with the Microsoft intellimouse driver
> (serial) so it detects the wheel.
> I now believe it is some hardware/driver looping forever but how can I
> diagnose this?

I never saw any errors in logs. Could only tell that system was alive by 
logging in remotely (I use vnc on a win95 box). My mouse cursor would 
still move but clicks or keyboard had no effect. I use a logitech 
trackball with wheel and generic drivers.

Another possible way to tell if system is totally crashed is the 
"autorun" daemon to detect cd's. It flashes the disk led every second 
and if it stops flashing you are probably totally crashed.

Also, at one time I had memory problems. You can run the memtest86 which 
is on the fc2 cd1 to do a long term and thorough memory test. My memory 
problems caused hard lockups and some file corruption. This was back 
when I was running rh 7.2. This might be a more likely cause than 
drivers since RH9 used XFree and fc2 uses xorg, a different driver set 
AFAIK.

> 
> Thanks for reading all.
>