On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, David Hough wrote:
I'm trying to work out what's wrong with one of my Fedora 7 systems. It suffers random seizures, sometimes completely locking up, other times apparently suffering partial lock-ups of one or two windows (as in they won't update the screen when clicked but others still work), followed shortly by a complete lock-up. Sometimes when locked up I can still ping it, although attempting ssh gets in but never provides a prompt (but see below). On reboot there's no clue in the syslog. The previous FC6 installation was rock-solid. Running a Xen kernel or VMWare (not on a Xen kernel) seems to guarantee a crash much faster than if I don't run either.
Have you run memtest86 lately? Could be a new problem with your memory.
Initial thoughts were about the Evil nVidia Binary Driver, but I swapped the graphics card for an ATI one and I still get lock-ups, so uninstalling the nVidia driver didn't fix it. I've left it running memtest overnight and it was quite happy. Another clue this morning was that I did manage to get an ssh shell from another machine, but it then objected to various commands with an input/output error. The machine spec is Fedora 7 on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo running on an Abit AB9 Pro motherboard. 4GB RAM, currently an ATI HD2600 graphics card, previously an nVidia GS7600 card. Three SATA drives (independent, no RAID), a SATA DVD and a Brainbox dual serial card. It's been through several kernels with the problem, currently claiming to be 2.6.22.5-76.fc7 #1 SMP Thu Aug 30 13:47:21 EDT 2007 and everything else maintained using yum update. System temperatures seem to be fine, CPU runs about 50C even when exercised. I have Fedora 7 on a Dell laptop and an Athlon machine and they're both quite happy. I still sort of suspect the graphics driver but have no real proof of it.
-- Never trust a queue structure designed by a cryptographer.
