[Bug 35697] System locks up when watching fullscreen flash video

bugzilla-daemon
2011-03-28T09:01:51Z

--- Comment #13 from Christophe Saout <christophe@saout.de> 2011-03-28 02:01:51 PDT ---
This sounds an very similar to the issue I am having. Note that I am seeing
this for quite a while now, ever since I switched to the gallium r300 driver.
First I blamed it for most of my components being bleeding-edge (kernel drm,
userspace libraries and so on). But the stuff slowly got merged into the kernel
and distributions, but the issue persists. I had high hops for the
page-flipping bug fix in 2.6.38, but it didn't fix the issue I am seeing.

Most of the time, at some point X would just stop updating the screen (sound
continues working and everything else seems to be alive). Actually, I traced it
down to compiz being unable to update the screen. Ctrl-Alt-F1 to the console,
"killall -9 compiz" and starting another non-GL window manager, the desktop is
usable just fine. (in 80% of the cases, I also had occasional total lockups,
where I had to hard reset the machine)
Most of the time, this issue is triggered by heavy screen updates. I tend to
not run Flash full-screen, but this is the kind of screen updates that is
likely to trigger the issue. Sometimes I can go for 1 day without that type of
crash, sometimes I can get it within 30 minutes.

After killing compiz (when the issue got triggered), GL is totally unusable.
Also, while the whole desktop then fully functional, a simple glxgears would
just lock up, both via AIGLX or directly. Killing the X server resolves the
issue, but sometimes even that won't help, everything GL related seems then to
be totally locked up and only a reboot can resolve the issue.

I am also running 64 bit Gentoo and only out-of-the box software versions
(2.6.38, mesa-7.10.1) at the moment, and sane compiler flags (-O2 -march=core2)
on a Lenovo T60 (Mobility X1400, r500 family).

I haven't tried disabling page flipping or any patches yet, since I just
stumbled upon this bug report.

So, I'm not sure if this is the same or a different issue. It seems to be
something in the kernel locking up, and in most of the cases userspace is still
running, so there might be a chance to being able to debug it without resorting
to guess-work. Since the thing starte since I switched to the gallium version,
I wouldn't know how to start bisecting.