Hardware: alienware sentia 223 with intel extreme graphics 2. My screen is 1280x800 at 24bpp. I have had this problem with stock fedora core 3 xorg (updated all the way) as well as rawhide 6.8.2. Symptoms: periodically the system will suddenly crash hard. At the time of crashing the screen image corrupts with vertical dancing lines and other flashing dots and artifacts. There is no warning when the crash will happen. I will be working, and suddenly the image will go corrupt. At this point the entire system is non-responsive. There are no kernel-panic blinking lights. When: This seems to occur under heavy cpu / network load, but it's not really predictable. It is almost guaranteed to happen if I leave the machine on overnight. I will attach an xorg.log and xorg.conf file, as well as an image of what the crash looks like. I also managed to capture a video, here: http://ywwg.com/videos/p2190009.mov (4.8M, works in mplayer).
Created attachment 1961 [details] Xorg.0.log My Xorg.0.log
Created attachment 1962 [details] my xorg.conf There are a lot of setups, but it crashes with any one of them, whether on just the internal screen or with xinerama.
Created attachment 1963 [details] Small screenshot of crashed computer
Can you try the driver at http://www.fairlite.demon.co.uk/intel.html
Assigning to me.
I tried that driver, and first indications were very promising, but my machine has crashed twice. However, both crashes were after the system had been suspended and resumed with swsusp. Since that's known to do wacky things, take it with a grain of salt. If the machine crashes again from a clean boot with that driver, I'll post to that effect. (btw, where did this driver come from? All of the other visual artifacts wrt XVideo are gone! yay!)
Crashed twice yesterday on clean boot with new driver. The only pattern is that it seems to happen more often if Azureus is running.
Is it the same crash as shown in the picture (i.e. with lines running down the screen ??)
It's always the same. The picture smears a bit horizontally and vertical and often also horizontal flickering lines dance around. During one of the crashes I was watching a video in totem, and larger rectangular sections than normal were flashing colors in the xvideo area.
Does it crash at all when not running 3D or Xvideo applications ?
I've just uploaded a new driver v1.5.19 - try that.
So far so good, but it can go days between crashes. It can crash at any time, including when the lid is down and the screen is locked (blank screensaver). The occasion last week when it crashed while playing a video was the first time it had done that.
Crashed last night, after nearly 14 hours of uptime.
Presumably it was using xscreensaver during last night ?? Do you use 3D regularly when these crashses occur ?
Oh, and can you ssh in from the network when the crash occurs ?? If so, can you check the output of 'dmesg' when it next occurs.
Yes, xscreensaver was on. I never use 3D. It just crashed 10 minutes ago while k3b was creating an image to burn to a DVD, and I wasn't even at the machine. It had been up for four whole minutes. I could tell by looking at the screen that the processor was doing basically nothing, and the network was doing nothing. The fans were low. I looked at the screen carefully, and it appeared that the pixels had spread horizontally a bit by primary color, so you could see separate red, green, and blue. Also the left side of the screen was mostly static (a little flickering here and there) but the right two or three inches of the screen was flashing more energetically. This time there were none of the vertical lines I usually see. The machine is never reachable through the network when it crashes. The machine just stops cold. Could this be a bad hardware issue? I sent the laptop off to Alienware service once (for another issue) and they checked it out and claimed it was ok, but I wonder about it. I hate this computer.
to clarify, I meant the left half of the screen was "static" as in "not moving."
Could be. Usually X can detect that the graphics chip has hung and cleanly aborts the Xserver. This is obviously a severe crash issue which could be attributed to hardware. I'd suspect your RAM first of all. And is it spec'ed correctly for the machine ? How much memory is installed, and in how many sticks ? If possible, try reducing the RAM, and then swapping the sticks around to see if it re-occurs. But check the speed of it too. I know some systems, although they have 3 sockets, they can only use 2 of them when using certain higher speeds of memory.
memtest86 didn't find anything wrong even after 2 cycles. However, I tried swapping the RAM modules, and four days later I haven't had a crash. At this point, even if it does crash again, I would say that it's not the fault of the driver and is more likely due to bad hardware. I would suggest this bug be closed and marked PEBKAC.
Marking NOTOURBUG as it looks like a hardware issue.
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