F11 OS Instability? Twice now, the system locks out!

[Daniel B. Thurman]

On 09/03/2009 05:17 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Thursday 03 September 2009 23:51:50 Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>    
>> On 09/03/2009 10:28 AM, James Wilkinson wrote:
>>      
>>> Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
>>>        
>>>> The last time I had a system lock-out was several
>>>> weeks ago, and just today, I experienced another.
>>>>          
>>> Which graphics card are you running?
>>>        
>> Onboard Intel 945G/GZ chipset
>>
>>      
>>>    Which driver?
>>>        
>> Latest from Fedora updates.
>>      
> I believe the last two lines explain the issue. Search the list archives and
> the internet --- the Intel graphics drivers became more than unusable, since
> Fedora 10 time (basically, with the transition from XAA to EXA). The situation
> has improved significantly by now, in the sense that today the driver locks up
> on a monthly basis rather than every 15 minutes, and the luckiest people do
> not experience any more lockups at all.
>
> The Intel drivers are going through a major code rewriting, and at some point
> in future may become stable enough again. Until then, consider yourself lucky
> enough if it hangs only once per month. Reboot and continue.
>
> You also might try to force the old, XAA acceleration, or disable 3D
> acceleration completely, in xorg.conf. This might eliminate the lockups, while
> at the same time degrade performance of the graphics card (and Intel doesn't
> have too much performance to begin with, anyway...).
>
> Or you may look inside /var/log/Xorg.0.log* to see if there is any backtrace
> of X or similar, and work from there.
>
> Of course, maybe I am barking up the wrong tree, it is possible that the
> problem lies elsewhere. But given that you have Intel graphics, X logs are the
> first place to look for signs of trouble.
>
> HTH, :-)
> Marko
>    

Since I have had a hung system every morning that I wake up,
I have tested to see if I could stop this problem by not allowing
certain applications to be running.

Keep in mind, that my F11 is heavily loaded with
(almost everything), but stock programs.

I turned off Banshee, Amarok, Firefox, Thunderbird, and left
my gnome screensaver running and set it to 'random'.

It did not hang overnight.

It's a bit early as I have further testing to do and try to
'divide & conquer' to see which applications is causing
this problem.

Dan