Kernel freeze when initializing graphic card (during X startup)

From: Leon Styhre (leonstyhre_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/06/04

  • Next message: U guess: "Re: Kernel freeze when initializing graphic card (during X startup)" 
    Date: 6 Feb 2004 14:41:56 -0800

    Hi all helpful people,

    I have a very serious problem with the 2.4.21 kernel (in SuSE 9.0).
    The problem is that the kernel freezes when starting up X under certain
    conditions, the background is the following:

    The machine is a x86 PC with an Asustek A7V8X motherboard with a 2000Mhz
    Celeron processor, a HighPoint IDE RAID controller (don't know the exact model),
    and a Matrox Millennium G550 graphic card.

    I installed the machine and tested it thouroughly (including some stress
    testing) and it seemed completely stable.
    The Matrox G550 that sits in the machine is a dual-head card, and until then I
    had only used one monitor with the card, however when configuring the machine as
    dual head, I started to get the kernel freeze problems.
    What happens is that sometimes when X starts, the screen just goes blank, and
    the system gets unresponsive to keyboard or mouse input. A few seconds later,
    you can't ping the machine, and a hardware/norwegian reboot is necessary.
    It can also happen, that if the kernel was accessing the disk at the time of
    the freeze, the disk access diod on the chassi will stay alight indefinately,
    which in my interpretation indicates a pretty bad kernel lockup in the middle
    of some disk I/O.

    Anyway, the only thing I could find in the logs was that the kernel reported
    a problem with the mtrr. But after recompiling the kernel with mtrr left out
    and still seeing this problem I assumed it wasn't cauing the crash.

    Finally after some testing I realized this:
    1) The kernel never freezes without the G550 card in the machine
    2) The kernel never freezes with the card configured as single-head
    3) The kernel never freezes with the card configured as dual-head, and monitors
    plugged in to both VGA connectors.
    4) The kernel almost always freezes with the card configured as dual-head, and
    no monitor (or a turned off monitor) attached to the secondary VGA connector.
    5) The freezes occur no matter what X settings are configured, (ie. DRI/no DRI,
    bitdepth, resolution, type of dual-head config etc.)

    (Note that the kernel only freezes when starting X and never when initalizing
    the console framebuffer or similar)
    In the conditions when it does freeze, that is also sporadic, happening every
    third time or so that X is started.
    The times X does in fact start properly with only one monitor attached to the
    card, it runs stable from then on.

    My conclusion is this: there's something wrong with the G550 drivers that
    results in sporadic crashes when initalizing both VGA connectors under the
    condition that there's nothing attached to the secondary connector.

    I've tried different kernel versions (SuSE 2.4.21-99 and 2.4.21-166) and also
    to download the latest version of the G550 drivers. I've changed X versions as
    well and it doesn't help.

    Anyway my questions are these:
    1) How can X kill the kernel? I thought that using a dri module for the
    graphic card was the only time when a device driver interfers with the internals
    of the kernel (correct?) and can as such disrupt its functions.
    2) How come the kernel doesn't even coredump, but just hangs, seemingly in the
    middle of performing disk I/O and such?
    3) How do X graphical device drivers work in respect to initializing hardware,
    is there some general specification on this so that it's easy to guess what is
    really cauing the freezes?
    4) And most important, is there any patch or other solution available to fix
    the problem?

    Please help me, it's necessary that I solve this issue. The machine (actually
    ten of them) is intended for a production environment and must run entirely
    stable. Even more so as I've convinced the management of the company I work for,
    that Linux is superior to Windows in these kind of environments, and that I've
    finally got an approval to get rid of our Windows stations in favour of Linux :)

    /Leon

  • Next message: U guess: "Re: Kernel freeze when initializing graphic card (during X startup)"

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