Ubuntu
xorg package

[Radeon 9250, RV 280] Without any warning the system crashes

Asked by Nibblyn

Without any warning the system crashes. On about 10 hours of operation you will have on average a fall. I might be mistaken, but I think X server could be the cause. Seems to happen when you use an application (browser, wordprocessor), rather than in stand-by. Most of the time you are back to login, although it may happen that the system becomes unable to restart X. Rebooting makes everything back to normal.

I used Hardy for several months and it was really stable. Later I updated to Intrepid and the problem presented itself quite soon. I reinstalled Intrepid but have not solved anything.

I noticed that sometimes after reboot the icons, placed on the destop, are moved into the top half of the screen. The background and the panels are positioned and working properly but it is impossible to reposition the icons back to the bottom part. Also, a new window, if opened, will refuse to enlarge to the bottom part of the screen. After a reboot everything returns to work.

This computer is quite old, has a PIII at 600Mhz and a Ati Radeon 9250 (RV280). There are no proprietary drivers installed. The xorg.conf file does not contain specific configurations by default in Intrepid. Even if I set it manually the problem remains. I think it could be the new version of Xorg or Radeon driver.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions even if I see it hard on Intrepid. Best hope for Jaunty or return to good old Hardy?

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marcobra (Marco Braida) (marcobra) said : 		#1

Please be sure your RAM memory is good:

To test your pc RAM memory chips:

- press ESC when you see the GRUB row at pc startup or boot from Ubuntu live cd and at first showed menu select the item "Memory test" to test your pc ram memory

Please run memory test for many hours or stop it and replace your memory chip if you get errors (the errors usually are rows in red colour)

If you have more than one memory chips plugged on your motherboard, to know which is the damaged
chip please run the memory test with only one chip plugged a time.

Hope this helps

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Nibblyn (nibblyn) said : 		#2

Many thanks for your answer, marcobra!

I ran the tests for 6 hours, 8 passes but found 0 errors. Then, while searching through available documentation, I found out that something strange must be going on with the Ati Radeon 1250 (RV280). I filled the xorg.conf, forcing the use of every hint I found here "https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver". Now I'm getting around 890 FPS instead of 1050 FPS but the machine seems to be rock stable again, especially while scrolling some heavy pages like in Firefox. I need some time to figure out which option actually did the trick then will report that (not really sure how to do this). Indeed, I presume that the radeon drivers must had been shipped in Hardy with some safety settings enabled by default. That precautions were believed unnecessary in Intrepid.