John F. Woods writes:

>> X still hangs up from time to time.  Usually when the CPU is quite busy
>> (e.g. when I complie something).
>> To Space Case:  I stopped using KDE since it's buggy.  I havn't tried
>> kpanel yet.
>> To Dave Sainty: I only use XF86_SVGA for now, so it's not a bug in
>> XF86_S3V.
>
>I assume you've got an S3Virge chip, then.
>
>I have a new system I'm trying to set up, and I'm also seeing random lockups
>using X with such a chip (SVGA driver).  I know it's not the getty issue
>because (a) I've copied my system configuration files over from my old box,
>which has been running quite happily since NetBSD 0.8 ;-), and (b) the system
>does not respond to ping.  Note:  I have DDB *disabled*, which means the
>system has not panicked (it should core dump and reboot, but it just wedges).
>
>I have only been seeing this problem with high-color modes, but that's with
>fairly light loads (like an "ls").  Perhaps it's just waiting for a high
>enough load to lock up in 8-bit mode as well.
>
>Is your graphic card an AGP card?  The XF86 documentation (such as it is)
>does warn that AGP has been tested on only a few chipsets, which does not
>include the S3 chips.  I really ought to get around to sending in a bug
>report to see if this is a plausible symptom of a bug in XF86, or if it's
>some kind of motherboard problem (QS440BX by BMC Advanced Research)...
>(I'm running -current as of about 4 days ago.)


My card is recognized as:

  S3 Trio32/64 (VGA display) at pci0 dev 18 function 0 not configured

I run it:

  xinit -- -bpp 8 >& X.log

If I leave the X11 display running on my pppd machine it hangs up as Dave 
Sainty says, "when the CPU is quite busy", usually after I've sup'd down the
new source and have started the build.  Once I reboot and restart the build
it finishes just fine.  I've reconfigured the kernel to allow PF12 to enter
the debugger and -g. (What key sequence is PF12 anyway?  F12 doesn't do the
trick!!)  I've started doing the sup on another machine (trhough the same pppd 
machine connection and the hang still occurs but a little less often).

It's annoying but, not disaterous.

Even before I was running X on the pppd machine that machine was hanging every
10 days or so.  I run newshound every 30 minutes and am caching with nntpcached.
And run by personnal page off that machine as well (not a lot of traffic there).

That's my 2 cents worth of observations.

later,
paul