Wondering if anyone else has had this happen to them...

I have an HP laptop that uses an ATI Radeon HD 5000. I'm using the most recent akmod'ed kmod with the most recent kernel. I'm using KDE4 as my WM and the most recent updates for the system.

Starting an update ago, this problem started happening. It leaves no crash, log entries, halt messages, nothing. If I be sure and lock the system, which activates the screen saver, then the system runs fine.

Suggestions would be appreciated in an effort to determine what is causing this problem to occur. I don't have a sysrq key, so kernel debugging not yet possible until I find a method for remapping the key sequence. Even then, I'm not sure I'd be able to find the reason this is happening.

TIA

Honestly, I am having a difficult time trying to understand what the error is, because you hardly describe it; You only partially described it in the subject line. Could you let us know, in better detail, what exactly the issue is?

Sure and apologies but trying to describe the problem is difficult.

First, my hardware is an HP laptop dv7-4290us. I can give greater detail of hardware later when I get to the machine and when the ISP is back up -- long story short, I'm currently deployed. Internet service here is scarce.

I'm running Fedora 15 fully updated. Here's a scenario of what happens from boot time...

I'm currently running a dual-boot system. The Linux OS runs from an external drive over eSata. When my system boots, and I get to KDM, I login. After logging in, if I let the system wait (I haven't tested the amount of time), the screen eventually blanks. Now, when the screen blanks, the system halts...completely. It is irrecoverable. No logs are written. No keyboard keys respond. Nothing. I have to hard power-cycle to recover. However, if I, instead of letting the screen blank on its own, simply lock the session, the system is fine. I'll be able to come back at any arbitrary time, log in, and continue my work.

Some questions that may be asked, I'll answer now. Yes, the screensaver is set up to kick on after 45 minutes of idle. This *may* be a power management issue in which the backlight is turned off after n minutes of time. I'll look into that and post. I'm not using xscreensaver and I only have one screensaver daemon configured to run, so I tried other window managers until F15 matured. I went back to KDE a couple of weeks ago and the problem did not return until after an update I performed a few days in which the catalyst driver was updated. I checked my akmods, the kmod, and everything else mod. The driver might be the issue, but I'm leaning toward something else given the nature of the problem.

Has anyone else seen this kind of issue before?

Hmm, that is weird. Sounds like a power management issue. Have you tried using a previous kernel? And FYI, I would be more of assistance if I was over there with you

Thanks! Being over here has been "interesting" :P

So, yes. I tried going back to the previous kernel in which the problem persisted. I'm looking at some pm stuff right now. The fact that no logs are written is where I'm totally baffled. To me, that would seem to be a kernel issue as well. Unfortunately, I don't have anything I can give the kernel devs to assist in fixing the problem. I'm mulling over it. I'm sure I'll think of something. I was just putting my feelers out there to see if this was something someone has seen before.

In an effort to test the situation (X or non-X), I'm checking to see what happens if I'm in a VTY with X running on VTY1. I'm just looking for some commonality. I'm not really familiar with power-management inner-workings so I'm readin up.