ATi Radeon 9550 + Open Source Radeon Driver Crash the Whole Box

[Chris Tyler]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:22:29 +0800 Hikaru Amano wrote: 
> On 4/16/07, Guo Lin <golvin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi guys.
> >
> > I installed Beryl recently on my FC6. It looks great, the animations
> are
> > always smooth and elegant on my ATi Radeon 9550. But after using it
> a while,
> > it starts crashing my pc, I mean my whole PC, not Beryl itself. When
> it
> > crashes, usually it turn off the power of my PC, leaving my power
> button
> > blinking, while at other times it just hang my PC ( i.e. cursor, num
> lock
> > and everything is not responding).
> >
> > I tried to let Beryl run on AIGLX and also on XGL + closed source
> driver,
> > but both result in these weird crashes.
> >
> > Could anyone please guide me to overcome this problem? Or did anyone
> > experience this before?
> >
> 
> can anybody help this guy? ... he's my classmate and I have tried to
> find the cause of the crash for quite a while but without success ...
> the system suddenly goes unresponsive / powered off ...
> 
> any information should I try to get from his PC so that I can file a
> bugzilla about this? ...

Could it be that the system is overheating and the BIOS is doing an
emergency shutdown? Obviously Beryl is going to work the CPU and GPU
much harder than a traditional setup, generating more heat.

I had a similar thing happen on a system each time I tried to encode DVD
video -- took a while to figure out what was going on, but rebooting the
system into the BIOS setup screen right after the shutdown and looking
at the temperature monitor proved that heat was the problem. Cranking
the CPU speed down and/or improving the fan setup may help in that case.

--
Chris Tyler
http://dailypackage.fedorabook.com