How to prevent system from becoming unresponsive when an app is using 2/3 cpu?

Martinus2u · 03-13-2012, 05:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ook

I did some poking around and it looks like this particular error has been around for a few years, and ATI hasn't been able to fix it (or maybe they don't want to...you never know with ATI...). And I'm not convinced it has anything to do with the problem I'm having.

I noticed that 3.2.11 is up on kernel.org, so I grabbed that. Patch with BFS patch. Compile. Boot. Black screen, hard lock. Reconfigure so that BFS is not enabled, compile, boot, boots just fine.

For some reason, enabling BFS gives me black screen with hard lock on boot. Not sure why. It boots and runs fine with the code there if BFS is disabled.

my own experience with fglrx is less than stellar, using nvidia now.

regarding BFS, it locks up before the fglrx module is loaded, right? maybe you can send your kernel config and lspci to Con Kolivas, to give him a chance to fix it: kernel at kolivas dot org

the3dfxdude · 03-13-2012, 05:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ook

I did some poking around and it looks like this particular error has been around for a few years, and ATI hasn't been able to fix it (or maybe they don't want to...you never know with ATI...). And I'm not convinced it has anything to do with the problem I'm having.

OK then I believe you are back to having Wine D3D emulation be the culprit. You are not hard locking when you are playing your SimCity, so your scheduler is working fine. BFS is a different problem.

However, I think that if fglrx is bugging out like that and everyone is seeing it, even if it is not fatal, I would have to question the quality of the driver.

Ook · 03-21-2012, 10:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by the3dfxdude

So, this is pointing to your video driver and not the scheduler. I can't say for sure, but this seem to be an smp bug in fglrx.

Is there anything that can be done about this, or am I at the mercy of ATI and their drivers?

I've upgraded to their current driver, and am currently running the 3.3 kernel. With this combination, anything that does anything with graphics, be it a game running via wine or even something as simple as cityville in the browser, will cause the gui to hard lock. No display update, and the mouse and keyboard do not respond. I can't even switch to a terminal when this happens, and the capslock/numlock light will not toggle.

I can ssh into the box and terminate the app, which will be using max cpu, and everything else will resume once I do this.

H_TeXMeX_H · 03-21-2012, 11:02 AM

Well, depending on the exact graphics card you have, you could try using the radeon drivers.

the3dfxdude · 03-21-2012, 10:33 PM

Have you tried looking in the wine appdb?

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=10515

The page generally recommends to set one core. I do not know if you tried that.

Also, I find this comment especially interesting:

Quote:

OpenGL rendering
by Marcin Falkiewicz on Saturday January 15th 2011, 16:16
SimCity 4 supports OpenGL mode under -d

pengl, which seems to work better than software on some configurations (I'm not sure does editing reg do the same)

Have you tried using the OpenGL mode?