7.0-BETA1 & 2 occasionally freezing, how to diagnose?

[Doug Poland]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 11:14:13PM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote:
> Doug Poland wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've been having frequent problems with BETA1 and now BETA2
> > "freezing".  There is no diagnostic information, nothing in
> > /var/log/messages, nothing, just a hung interface.  I cannot ssh
> > into the machine and it appears the box ceases to communicate on
> > SSH. A couple of times I've had screen corruption on the laptop's
> > LCD display.
> > 
> > Every time it hands I'm running Xorg 7.3, Thunderbird, Firefox,
> > pidgin, and a bunch of xterms.
> > 
> > Is there something I can do to diagnose this issue?
> 
> Only random generic troubleshooting items:
> 
> - how's your heating? 
>
the fan on the laptop runs continuously, sometimes on high speed.  I
typically see temps between 140 (mostly idle) -> 165 (make -j4
buildworld) Fahrenheit.

> screen corruption looks like memory or bus errors.
>
In my situation, it usually manifests itself as the external LCD monitor
goes blank (says "no signal") and the bottom half of the internal LCD
gets weird, multi-colored square patterns.

> are you running powerd?
>
yes: I recently started running powerd, within the last couple of weeks

> - can you set up a serial or firewire connection to it and monitor the
> machine from there ("screen corruption" may also mean a kernel message
> being printed in text mode, in the part of memory now mapped for
> graphics - if this is the case you'll see the message over the serial
> console).
> 
I've done serial console redirection before but this  laptop has no
serial port.  Can I get console redirection via firewire?  Can you point
me at some docs?


-- 
Regards,
Doug