HELP! System keeps locking up

[Rick Stevens]

On 02/20/2014 03:42 AM, John Aldrich issued this missive:
> Hello, all...
> I'm running Fedora 20 on a homebrew PC It's an AMD Athlon X2 processor with an
> on-board nVidia display chipset.
> This is a fresh install of F20, pretty much up to date. I had to do a fresh
> install since I mangled the upgrade from F18.
> Every once in awhile, mainly when I'm trying to unlock the screen, the system
> will freeze up. My display is a black background with "bits" of color in a
> diagonal pattern.
> I say "mainly when trying to unlock the screen" because I had it happen to me
> this morning (third time in 24 hours) when I was thinking of trying a different
> screen saver (been using Moebius Gears) on the thought that maybe the Noveau
> driver doesn't like the GL screen saver for some reason.
> Every time this happens I have to use the reset button on my system. This
> morning when it happened, I had an SSH window from another PC logged in and it
> was frozen as well.
> I have checked /var/log/messages and there is nothing in there that would
> indicate a problem. There was hardly anything in there since about 8PM last
> night and it's locked up twice since then.
> Suggestions/thoughts/theories???
> I'm running XFCE, if it matters, but still using parts of KDE as well.

I've hit a similar thing on a homebrewed Athlon machine as well. The
nouveau driver didn't like the nVidia video card and it would hard lock
periodically. The machine is powered down right now, so I can't tell
you which nVidia it has, however switching to the nVidia binary driver
solved the problem for me.

My suggestion is that you gather all the X logs, messages logs and dmesg
info you can and file a bug report. I started that process but my time
got heavily soaked up at work and has prevented me from following
through on the whole debug process with the nouveau gang. They were
quite interested in the problem.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital    ricks at alldigital.com -
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-      To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the OS       -
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