Ok I know most people will blame this problem on hardware and I am sure its related. But...

I have Slackware 9.0 installed. I had upgraded from Slackware 7.1. Under 7.1 the pc ( AMD 500mhz / 6gig drive / 256 memory ) ha been running like a tank for 3 years. Never a problem. But since upgrading to SL9 I have a random problem. The screen will blank out, either in Xwindows or in console and nothing will respond. Its locked up hard. I noticed one time when it did this, that it sounded like the hard drive spun down and then the HD light stayed lit up. So I turned off the standby time. This help as the freezes are less freqent now.

My only suspect is that the new kernel is using power management features that I am not aware of, but that seems odd if it would do something while I am actively using it. I have all bios apm features turn off. I also tried to use hdparm to also turn off any apm features in teh hard drive but the drive is too old for that.

So any suggestions would be helpful ( bios changes, kernel settings, etc. ) and I know I could replace the drive, I am just not convinced thats going to solve the problem. Its just very coincidental that the problem began with SL9 installation.

What about the (*dreaded*) acpi business? is this machine new enough to have acpi? is acpid running now and not before? or, even more *dreaded*, are apmd and acpid running at the same time?

oops, forgot this, my screen(s) blank (some of them, some of the time) but don't freeze on an "ntpdate" command, could this be anything to do with the sysclock vs hwclock?

I am in agreement with akaBeaVis on this one. I have heard (many times) of acpi and apm causing problems such as you describe (although this might not, obviously, be your actual problem).


As for APM, if you examine your /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file, you may see a line such as:

If this line is not commented out (with '#') then you may wish to do so as a test. That is, make the above line look like:


Additionally, as to ACPI, you may find that you have a file such as /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid. You may wish to do a:

ls -al /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid

and see if the file is listed as executable. If it is, then it will be loaded at startup.

In my case, I get:

sh-2.05b$ ls -al /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 466 Aug 28 02:57 /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid


indicating that this acpid script is run at boot. You may (as root)

chmod 644 /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid


In my case this results in:

bash-2.05b# ls -al /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 466 Aug 28 02:57 /etc/rc.d/rc.acpid

which indicates this script will not be run at boot.

Reboot and see if it helps your freezing.

Note than I am a newb at this linux stuff, so I mean not to offend you if my comments seem elementary to you. Just trying to help with what I have learned.

Cheers,
Bob

No acpi on this machine and I ran rc.acpid stop and there were no processes running. I have set the udma setting now to 0. I am seeing fi this helps. My next choice will be compiling a new kernal, thats assuming it does not lockup while compiling it. :grin:

you've checked the logs for any weirdness?

does this machine have hotplug installed?

To answer the last two replies, no hotplug in this machine, again too old. And the log files just stop dead. The only thing I can tell from the logs is when it stops within a 10 minute window because of the mark entries.

I compiled a new kernel but I think I did afew things wrong. So back to the drawing board again. I am now beggining to suspect and overheating CPU since the system is completly dead when it hangs. I don't suspect the hard drive cause a bad hard drive not cause the kernel to die or anything else.

Well I am hear to say I am wrong. Sortof. After turnning off FB and disabling other features like the DRM for Radeon, I got a clue what might be causing it. I left the system running in console and came back to it frozen. But this time I found not a blank screen but garbage. This gave me a clue it was video. So I took out the card ( an ATI Radeon 32SDR PCI ) and installed a little older ATI Rage128 PRO ( Expert 2000 ) card.

I have now been able to run more than 24 hours with out a lockup / freeze. And I recompile my kernel to activate FB and DRM for the Rage128. Its seems so strange that Slack 7 ran like a tank with the Radeon card but Slack 9 didn't like it. My only thought was the fact that this was a PCI Radeon card, and one of the first ones produced by ATI. Maybe there was something changed in the 2.4 kernel versus the 2.2 kernel that caused the problem. I have the Radeon card running in a Windoze box flawlessly currently.

What are other's thoughts on this?