[BUGS] Nightmare on X street :(

[matti k]

On Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:09:52 +1100
Trevor Roydhouse <trev at sentry.org> wrote:

> I'd been happily running XFree86 for as long as I can recall, but its 
> replacement with Xorg has been causing a growing number of issues
> with some X ports (partly it seems because some ports insist on
> various Gnome bits 'n pieces, which in turn insist on various Xorg
> bits 'n pieces), and so I reluctantly took the plunge, removed
> XFree86 and compiled and installed the latest and greatest Xorg-7.3.
> (Yes, I also removed and recompiled all my X apps.)

Hi Trevor, did you update all ports/packages as well?

> Within 20 minutes to 3 hours, if using X, the entire machine would 
> lockup. No network, no mouse, no keyboard and, of course, no logs or 
> error messages. I became re-acquainted with Lost+Found directories
> for the first time in years. The only obvious symptom of the lockup
> was that the usually solid green LED on the ATEN KVM (sucking power
> from the keyboard port) was reduced to flickering once the machine
> locked up. Significant?

maybe significant, did you try without the switch?

> Well, ok, maybe I was going to have to stick with XFree86, so I
> removed Xorg, downloaded the latest release (4.7.0) tarballs,
> compiled and installed. No way was it going to let me run the
> Xserver. It crashed (signal 11s) before making it to the desktop. No
> errors in the log file but, hey, at least it didn't lockup the
> machine.

does sound like software, see above.

> So, I'm back to the ever-reliable XFree86-4.5 in the ports, replete
> with dire warnings that it's being removed from the ports after 25
> December 2007.
> 
> FreeBSD shadow.sentry.org 6.3-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 6.3-PRERELEASE #39:
> Thu Nov  1 16:03:57 EST 2007 
> xxxxxxxx at shadow.sentry.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SHADOW  amd64
> 
> Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard, AMD 4200+ dual core CPU, 2Gb Corsair
> RAM, Nvidia FX 5500 256Mb AGP video card, Adaptec 29160 host adapter,
> 4 Seagate SCSI drives.
> 
> Google didn't help and so, here I am. Any ideas, particularly, on why 
> Xorg hates me so?

I have noticed a few reports about lockups from people updating
recently but nothing X related ... just a quick analysis, from me.

Cheers,
Matti