[wplug] Machine is locking up without a trace

[Carl Benedict]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 15:13, Scott F. Kiesling wrote:
> 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.
> 

This could be the problem.  The thread you pointed to is saying that
after a similar message, their system would lock up waiting for X to
translate that keycode.  Although the page title says it was kernel
2.6.0-test9.

Can you correlate this lockup to a specific keypress or situation?  Are
there any more similar messages in your log file?  Seeing how you are in
the Dept. of Linguistics, does this happen when you are using a
particular input method for another language?  Or maybe you are using a
non-standard keyboard? I've had some trouble recently with Korean input
methods or glyph rendering killing my X session completely under kernel
2.6.6.

A google for the specific error message in quotes returned quite a few
results.  I don't see anything relevant yet though.

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

-- 
Carl Benedict
Pittsburgh Techs
Main:  724-741-0233
http://www.pittsburghtechs.com
cbenedic at pittsburghtechs.com