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

[Tyler Aviss]

I had a computer that was flakey when it came to PS/2 devices as well.
It may have been the computer, or the controller, but when I played
various games it was constantly jerky and would have sound "hiccups",
etc.
I checked for CPU spikes, swapped video cards, etc, and had no luck.

One day I noticed that it seemed to happen when I was holding a key,
like SHIFT or ALT. So I swapped to a USB keyboard which - lo and
behold - solved the issue.

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 4:36 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY
<clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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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>



-- 
Tyler Aviss
Systems Support
LPIC/LPIC-2/DCTS/CLA

“It can takes months to gain a customer, but only seconds to lose one"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists