[LAU] Hard lock-ups -- Trying to narrow the cause

Darren Landrum darren.landrum at sbcglobal.net
Sat May 23 12:12:02 EDT 2009


Just had another lockup, a hard one (not even the mouse pointer would
move) In addition (and this always happens, I forgot to mention it), the
audio in the sound buffer at the time of the lock-up will loop over and
over again making a sort of jack-hammer noise depending on what was in
there at the time.

This time, I had no proprietary Nvidia driver going, so that's
eliminated as the cause. Unfortunately, I didn't ping the machine
because it suddenly occurred to me that I'd never tried to ping the
machine when it was working, so any result might be meaningless. I'll be
sure to capture that baseline today.

The other things I've eliminated is Flash playback, as this happened
when I was playing back a long mp3 (a BBC podcast) in Totem. One other
pattern I've noticed is that these hangs always happen when I'm playing
back something with audio. I guess the next logical test is to go a week
or so without playing anything and see what happens.

So, I think it has to be the sound card. Whether it's a driver issue or
a hardware issue remains to be seen.

You can consider this email an angry rant more than anything, I suppose.
:-/ Thanks for the help.

-- Darren



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