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

[Kris Kennaway]

Doug Poland wrote:
> 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

Try disabling it; it (actually acpi_throttle, which powerd uses) is 
known to cause hangs on dual core systems at least.

Kris