Re: Linux, the final decision

From: Linønut (linønut_at_bone.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 10:44:19 -0600

Fearing a spontaneous XP reboot, Christopher Browne mumbled this incantation:

> Actually, one of the remaining ways that you can totally lock up a
> Linux box is for XFree86 to crash, hard.
>
> There is an inherent, unpreventable system vulnerability there in that
> PCI/AGP graphics cards have the capability to write to system memory,
> so that bugs in the graphics "drivers" or bugs in the graphics card
> chipset are quite capable of spewing trash into memory, and there
> isn't a way for _any_ OS to survive that gracefully.
>
> I have run into such problems with numerous graphics cards over the
> years.

I've only run into it with one card, this old Matrox Productiva G100 AGP
card on my main box. Very annoying.

Also, my reformatted SanDisk memory dongle also locks everything up.
Highly annoying. 

-- 
No, I won't fix your Windows computer!

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