[wplug] Machine is locking up without a trace

[Scott F. Kiesling]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 02:33:01PM -0500, Ryan W. Frenz wrote:
> From: "Ryan W. Frenz" <rfrenz at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 14:33:01 -0500
> To: General user list <wplug at wplug.org>
> Subject: Re: [wplug] Machine is locking up without a trace
> 
> > Any chance it's related to
> > Power Management?  That age is a prime candidate for that period of time
> > when things weren't really stable from a HW / PM standpoint (like the
> > Intel GX chipset perhaps?)
> 
> I had a similar problem on an IBM laptop of similar age...and it ended
> up being ACPI -- I just disabled it and didn't lock up again.  In my
> experience APM has been much more stable, at least w.r.t. IBMs.
> 

Thanks already for all the usual excellent help, which will
take me a while to follow. 

In the meantime, I looked in the logs for some ACPI stuff, but did find this
right before the second time this happened:

	atkbd.c: Spurious ACK on isa0060/serio0. Some program, like
	XFree86, might be trying access hardware directly

I googled 'atkbd ACK' and got a lot of kernel hacking things
I didn't really understand, like this:

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2003-10/5413.html

I'd appreciate knowing if this is something to ignore.

Any idea if rebuilding with a new kernel might help, or
hurt?

SFK

> 
> On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 14:21:09 -0500, Vanco, Don <don.vanco at agilysys.com> wrote:
> > >-----Original Message-----
> > 
> > 
> > >From: wplug-bounces+don.vanco=agilysys.com at wplug.org
> > >[mailto:wplug-bounces+don.vanco=agilysys.com at wplug.org] On
> > >Behalf Of wmoran at potentialtech.com
> > >Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 1:21 PM
> > >To: Scott F. Kiesling
> > >Cc: wplug at wplug.org
> > >Subject: Re: [wplug] Machine is locking up without a trace
> > >
> > >
> > >Quoting "Scott F. Kiesling" <kiesling at pitt.edu>:
> > >
> > >> Folks I have a mysterious problem which I think is
> > >> hardware-based but I can't find the problem. I've looked
> > >> around but haven't a lead.
> > >>
> > >> Running Gentoo, Kernel 2.6.7 on a Dell Inspiron 5000 (~4.5
> > >> years old).
> > >>
> > >> In short, the machine just stops. This happened first while
> > >> running X, but it has also happened when an X session has
> > >> not been started.
> > >>
> > >> I've looked in /var/log/messages and the X logs but haven't
> > >> found anything at all.
> > >>
> > >> e2fsck and reiserfsck show that my fs are OK.
> > >>
> > >> I'd appreciate any suggestions on where to look next.
> > >>
> > >> And yes, I have backed things up.

-- 
Scott F. Kiesling

Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh
    
2816 Cathedral of Learning     Phone: 1-412-624-5916
Pittsburgh, PA 15217 USA       Fax: 1-412-624-6130

kiesling at pitt.edu
http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/skpage.html
http://www.linguistics.pitt.edu