The symptoms of the freeze are similar to those described by i915kms users, but the C400 laptop (1.2GH Pentium-M, 768M RAM) has the i830M built-in graphics.
This freeze also happens with NetBSD, FreeBSD, and several Linuxes. It works, however, with OpenBSD 4.8 & 4.9. The commonality of current distros makes me think it is an X-windows issue. The i830M is mentioned in the following: The Intel 8xx and 9xx families of integrated graphics chipsets have a unified memory architecture meaning that system memory is used as video RAM. For the i810 and i815 family of chipsets, operating system support for allocating system memory is required in order to use this driver. For the 830M and later, this is required in order for the driver to use more video RAM than has been pre-allocated at boot time by the BIOS. Which makes e wonder if it is a memory issue. I can bump the Dell C400 up to 1G RAM if that will help. Is there boot time configuration(s) I can give the laptop to restrain or expand the RAM allocated to the i830M?' Ideas welcome. -Stephen
