This does not work with normal mplayer. Start gmplayer from a xterm/whatever, kill the terminal and notice the lockup. My kernel isn't completely dead, as my netconsole is still showing buffer full errors from my tvcard. Magic SysRq keys don't work. ssh is dead. I've seen this problem on a 1.4 xserver and on a git xserver (currently 1.4 branch HEAD). But i only found today how to reproduce it (fairly) consistently. These kinds of problems have bothered for a few months already. I reproduced it with the nouveau, nv and vesa driver. Also tried xv, gl2 and x11 adapters. All suffer from the same problem. Lack of a kernel oops or any such message suggests the kernel is not the most likely candidate. I would have expected the (soft)lockup detection or the NMI watchdog to kick in if that were the case. I'm filing the bug here, because a non-root app like gmplayer should never be able to do this, so something with more access is to blame, the X server is a suspect. I tried everything i know of, short of using a serial console (which i don't have). If you could give any hints, that would be appreciated as i understand this not an easy thing to fix.
I tested this with xterm and aterm. On two window managers (dwm and openbox). With and without xcompmgr active. And for a source that isn't my tv card. All have the same issue. My kernel version is 2.6.24 if that's of any interest.
Mass closure: This bug has been untouched for more than six years, and is not obviously still valid. Please file a new report if you continue to experience issues with a current server.
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