Help diagnosing a lockup

[James Wilkinson]

Federico Tello Gentile wrote:
> I just checked and I'm using the S3 driver (as I read it from the
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf)
> I never had a lockup while playing music, but even if it is a partial
> lockup, isn't there something I can do to be able to diagnose the
> causes when it happens again? maybe put a cron that logs to a file
> every 2 minutes a timestamp so I can see if it keeps running? Can
> somebody write that script for me? (i'm cluless about bash.).

while true; do date >> logfile ; sync ; sleep 60 ; done

Replace logfile with the name of the logfile you want, replace 60 with
the period (in seconds) between writes.

The sync command should make sure that all outstanding writes reach disc.

As to how you run that: you could run it from the command line, or put
it into a startup script.

If you put
nohup ( while true; do date >> logfile ; sync ; sleep 60 ; done ) > /dev/null 2> /dev/null &
into /etc/rc.d/rc.local (and you'd probably better specify
/var/log/logfile or whatever), it should automatically run at boot and
never end.

Hope this helps,

James.
-- 
E-mail address: james | I suppose if one has to go mad, slowly is the way to
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | go. You wouldn't want to rush going mad, you might
                      | miss some of the good bits.
                      |     -- Paul Tomblin