I have been experiencing this problem for quite some time now, but I have found that when I use gentoo-sources-2.6.20-r4 instead of other kernels, the problem seems to go away.
Last night, I was trying 2.6.21-r2 to see if I still experienced the problem. I had started a lengthy copy process before going to bed. When I woke this morning, the computer was in fact locked up. Like always, the cursor still moved around the screen when I moved the mouse, but button clicks and keyboard keystrokes had no effect. Again, I had to use the Magic SysRq sequence to reboot the machine. When it had rebooted, back to 2.6.20-r4, I restarted rsync to finish the copy process. To my surprise, the copy was already finished. I should point out that every time I experience this, I try unsuccessfully to ssh into my computer. The computer does not respond to any network traffic I initiate, SSH, ICMP, HTTP, etc. I have an nVidia GeForce 6600 running the proprietary "nvidia" driver. I h ave no DPMS option in my xorg.conf, and xscreensaver is running, though set to never display a screen saver. Dustin C. Hatch http://www.dchweb.com Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Friday 08 June 2007 10:19:08 Sebastian Redl wrote: > >> Michael Ulm wrote: >> >>> In xorg.conf, in the monitor section, I was missing the line >>> Options="DPMS" >>> >>> I'll still have to research how leaving out this option could lead to >>> crashes, so I appreciate any insight this group may give. >>> >> Since practically every monitor supports this, and since it's >> practically always enabled, it may be that other code paths of X.org are >> insufficiently tested, causing the server to crash when it wants to put >> the monitor into a power saver mode. That's my best guess. >> > > My experience doesn't match this. I've had to remove the DPMS option from my > xorg.conf to prevent lockups. Those only happened if I left the KDM login > screen up until the screen blanker cut in, but then the only way out was a > hard reset. > > Apart from wanting my machine to do only what I tell it to, and I'm quite > capable of switching my monitor off when I'm not using it, I think it's > dangerous for any system to make assumptions about what facilities will be > required in any particular case. > > My hardware is an nVidia GeForce 7300 GS driving an Iiyama AU4831D screen, > and the X nv driver comes from x11-base/xorg-x11-7.2. Or sometimes I play > with the nVidia closed-source drivers, but as far as I know that doesn't > affect the lockups. > >