Random Freezes With Fedora 12 and 13 on i5-750 System - Solution

CLIFFORD ILKAY clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Thu Aug 5 20:36:02 UTC 2010


Hello,

Ever since February, any of the Fedora 12 kernels have caused random 
freezes with the system I'm currently using, which has an Asus P755D 
motherboard (with the latest BIOS), i5-750 CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an 
nVidia 9600GTS (the "s" is for silent - it has no fan). The machine 
could run anywhere from a few minutes to an hour and eventually, the 
keyboard and mouse would become unresponsive. The caps or num lock keys 
had no effect but I could ssh into the machine and do an init 6. I 
ignored the problem by sticking with the old kernel that worked.

I just added a few more drives to this machine and figured that as long 
as I was at it, I might as well install Fedora 13. Even the live CD had 
the same freezing problem as I had with the newer Fedora 12 kernels so I 
rebooted and passed the "noapic" parameter to the kernel. The live CD 
worked long enough that I could install onto the new drives. However, it 
didn't take long after rebooting from the new drive that the same 
problem occurred.

That started a series of trial-and-error runs where I passed "acpi=off" 
and "noapictimer", one at a time, and waited for the machine to lock up, 
or not. Neither helped. There was nothing unusual in syslog or dmesg. 
The KDE clock was still incrementing seconds and on one of the lockups, 
I was using rsync to copy files from the old drive to the new one and 
even though I had no keyboard or mouse control, konsole was still being 
updated and I could see and hear disk activity. I let rsync finish and 
rebooted.

This time, I tried installing the nVidia binary driver and managed to 
get the machine into an unbootable state. Since I had little invested in 
this installation, it was just as easy to reinstall and install the 
binary driver right away. This time, the driver installed fine but 
again, the machine locked up after running about 40 minutes.

The big clue came when I was typing a response to an email and after I 
typed the letter "e", it was as if I was holding the key down even 
though I wasn't. (No, the key wasn't stuck.) I have an IBM PS/2 keyboard 
and a proper three button Logitech PS/2 mouse. I plugged in a USB 
keyboard into the machine and the keyboard was working. I have a PS/2 to 
USB keyboard/mouse adapter so I unplugged the PS/2 keyboard and mouse, 
plugged them into the adapter, and plugged the adapter into a USB port. 
I'm typing on the same IBM keyboard that was plugged into the PS/2 port 
when the freeze happened and I haven't rebooted. Crazy, isn't it?
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis
1419-3266 Yonge St.
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

<http://dinamis.com>
+1 416-410-3326
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