Hello, I'm having random freezes with a weird behaviour.

My Laptop is an HP Compaq Presario F706LA: AMD Turion 64 MK-38 (1 core), 1 GB RAM, 120 GB Enhanced IDE SATA Hard Disk, and I can give more information if you need to.

I'm running Slackware 12 with kernel 2.6.24.2, and I have random freezes, ONLY in the following situations:

- when I'm in a non-X tty, sometimes everything freezes. Must plug out the cable and start over again. At first there was no apparent reason. Today, it freezed two consecutive times when doing a removepkg * in a directory containing 10-12 packages (freezes when removing files). Now, the weird thing is that, after the second freeze, I reboot and try to do the same thing in an xfce terminal in X.. and everything goes fine. I should also say that freezes have never occured inside X (nvidia 100.14.19 driver).

- the other possible situation that happened is when switching from X to a tty. This didn't happen so often, but maybe a couple of times...

I have, sincerely, NO IDEA on what is going on here.. possibilites, I believe, are things related to I/O, SATA, processor things, acpi things..

Also, I can't find any log messages or so.. and it's definitely not the hardware since other SOs run fine (didn't try other linux distro though, only Windows and FreeBSD).

At last, I also experienced freezes with the generic 2.6.21.5 kernel that came with slackware.. although I didn't test it too much.

Any hints?? Thanks!!

I can't post my config file for the kernel here. Please anything you think that may help you figure it out, tell me and I'll post it. Thanks again!

I wonder if updating your kernel might help. I used to have freezes on my HP amd64 desktop in the past but it has been months since it has occurred. The only differences I know of from then and now are the kernel and not using compiz.

I use SuSE, so my kernel may have SuSE specific patches. The kernel currently is "2.6.22.17-0.1-default".
My desktop has a dual-core AMD64 processor and I have the 64 bit version of the distro installed.

Try to look through the system logs for anything suspicious, they are in '/var/log'
'Xorg.0.log' for last xorg log
'Xorg.0.log.old' for xorg log before last
'messages' and 'syslog' are ordered by date and time (timestamped) look at the approximate time of the crash.

Well, the kernel is the latest available, 2.6.24.2.

Right now syslog and messages don't say anything, the latest thing is from last night when everything worked fine in the end. I will try to see if I can get other freeze and then look at messages. syslog definitely didn't log anything since I've checked it all the times it freezed.

Also, the xorg log doesn't say anything, mainly because X works better than the tty's (now, that's weird). I'm not using compiz either.

SOLVED:
At least I think it is solved. I booted the kernel with the noapic option, and the weird way I had for generating freezes does not longer work. Anyway, what is this APIC stuff anyway? What am I missing?

APIC is Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller, it's a way of managing IRQ's (I think):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apic

Unfortunately, the wiki doesn't say much, and really I don't know much more than that either. Do some google searches maybe some answers will come up. All I know is that it can safely be disabled without issues, in fact it tends to cause more issues while activated than disactivated.