Date: Wed, 28 Feb 96 22:17 PST From: pete@pelican.com (Pete Carah) To: sreid@edmbbs.iceonline.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: X Windows crashes big-time Message-ID: <m0ts1gL-0000SMC@pelican.com> In-Reply-To: <9602260503.D8475on@edmbbs.iceonline.com>
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In article <9602260503.D8475on@edmbbs.iceonline.com> you write:
>I have a problem with X Windows crashing on a FreeBSD 2.1 machine. It's
>not just a little crash- the whole machine freezes, and we have to use
>the reset button. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and Ctrl-Alt-Delete don't have any
>effect.
>I type startx to go into a freshly installed Xwindows, and it works for
>a few seconds. I can move the mouse around, but before I get a chance
>to do anything, the machine dies.
>The system is a Pentium-100, Asus Triton motherboard. 16 megs of 60ns
>EDO ram. 256k burst pipeline cache. 1GB Quantum HD on an Adaptec 2940
>SCSI-2. Video card is Diamond Stealth 64 (2MB VRAM) on PCI, using
>640x480x256 mode. I'm using the S3 server, and I selected the Diamond
>Stealth Pro as the video card in the config (the vid card manual says
>the 64 is backwards-compatible with the Pro). No clocks line or RAMDAC
>selected. The mouse is a Logitech Mouseman, and I've selected Mouseman
>in the config file. Also have an SMC EtherPower 10/100 in 10Mbps mode.
Mine lasted longer; it crashed hard whenever I loaded very many pictures
(pixmaps in general). I could surf the web for an average of 2 sites
before it crashed :-(
The solution for me was a combination; sup the 2.1-STABLE sys tree (may
not be needed but DG said there were a few kernel-stack handling fixes),
and *also* get the latest S3 server from ftp.xfree86.org. (it should
be 3.1.2B-Beta or later; the A-Beta one didn't fix the problem at least
for me. A more minor version of this happens to a friend on a 486
with a VLB S3 card (fahrenheit 1280+ VLB with 2mb ram) but he only
crashes every other day or so.
There is another later server now; I don't know much about either of
these, but on ftp.xfree86.org:
ftp> pwd
257 "/pub/XFree86/3.1.2D/FreeBSD-2.0.5" is current directory.
ftp> dir *S3*
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
-rw-r--r-- 1 701 1190 1206787 Feb 25 07:31 X312D9NS3.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 701 1190 1199083 Feb 25 09:51 X312DS3.tgz
226 Transfer complete.
The X312BS3.tgz worked fine for me (in another directory, of course...)
I don't know what a 9NS3 is either.
Part of the 312B release notes say:
-----
o Improved linear fb detection for PCI cards. In particular this
should allow most Trio64V+ cards to use the linear fb, which
seems to prevent a lot of the lockups that have been reported.
------
Though my old non-direct-mapped S3 card had lockups too, so I don't know
if this is the whole story.
BTW it also happened to me using an ISA S3 card (Fahrenheit 1280+) so
the bug, whatever it was, didn't depend on the huge memory map or the
Trio chip of the Stealth 64. I ended up changeing out my cache, ram,
and the video card all to no avail :-( At least static cache is getting
cheap... (and I ended up using it in the W95 machine I built up for my
daughter)
(I'm also using an ASUS Triton (XE) motherboard with a P100, back to
pipeline burst cache, 16mb of non-edo ram. 16mb is shy of enough to
run the accel server and netscape; it ends up swapping a bunch with
nothing else but a few xterms :-(
-- Pete
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