Re: Freeze with ATI Xpress 200

Re: Freeze with ATI Xpress 200

[Davor Cubranic]

Just to follow up on my original report: This seems to be a problem
with running AMD "Cool & Quiet" when using the on-board graphics. (Why
would Shuttle design an AMD motherboard with a integrated graphics
which crashes the system if C&Q is turned on? Good question. Shame on
Shuttle.) I initially reported that Windows worked fine, but although
I did have AMD CPU driver installed on Windows, C&Q wasn't turned on
in the "power options" control settings. Once I did that, Windows
started crashing with the same symptoms as well until I turned it off
again. I then turned off powernowd in Ubuntu and haven't seen it crash
since. I'm guessing I never saw this in Gentoo because it did not have
powernowd activated by default.

At any rate, this is not a kernel issue, sorry for the trouble.

Davor

P.S. I am not on this list, so please email me directly with any
comments or questions.

On 10/30/06, Davor Cubranic <cubranic@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am experiencing occasional system freezes in Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) on
> a Shuttle ST20G5 with an Athlon (Venice) CPU and ATI Xpress 200
> chipset. It happens in X only -- the entire screen goes white and the
> computer does not respond any more to anything but power-cycle. I had
> the same issue in Breezy, then switched to Gentoo 2006.0 where
> everything worked fine, and now that I'm back to Ubuntu with Dapper, I
> see the issue is still there. It usually happens within an hour,
> especially once I start up Firefox and/or Thunderbird. There are no
> messages on the screen (at least those that are visible in X) or
> kernel logs, the kernel crashes that hard.
>
> I've had this happen with open-source Radeon driver on Dapper and
> ATI's fglrx drivers and the generic VESA on Breezy, so it doesn't look
> like the problem is in the graphics driver. As I already mentioned,
> this did not happen on Gentoo (both 2.6.15 and 2.6.16 kernels) nor on
> Windows XP sp2 (dual-boot), and I haven't found any memory errors
> using memtest. I would be happy to do any further investigation that
> would help in narrowing down the problem, but am at a loss at where to
> even start, so I'll submit my system's details here and I hope someone
> can tell me if there is anything I can do to either narrow down the
> source of the problem or capture more details about the crash.
>
> Davor
>
>
>

Re: Freeze with ATI Xpress 200

[Nigel Cunningham]

Hi Davor.

On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 14:17 -0800, Davor Cubranic wrote:
> Just to follow up on my original report: This seems to be a problem
> with running AMD "Cool & Quiet" when using the on-board graphics. (Why
> would Shuttle design an AMD motherboard with a integrated graphics
> which crashes the system if C&Q is turned on? Good question. Shame on
> Shuttle.) I initially reported that Windows worked fine, but although
> I did have AMD CPU driver installed on Windows, C&Q wasn't turned on
> in the "power options" control settings. Once I did that, Windows
> started crashing with the same symptoms as well until I turned it off
> again. I then turned off powernowd in Ubuntu and haven't seen it crash
> since. I'm guessing I never saw this in Gentoo because it did not have
> powernowd activated by default.
> 
> At any rate, this is not a kernel issue, sorry for the trouble.
> 
> Davor
> 
> P.S. I am not on this list, so please email me directly with any
> comments or questions.

Thanks for the email. I didn't notice the first one, but have been
having similar problems with my Turion based laptop that also has a 200M
chipset. I had previously assumed it was a buggy BIOS or something sort
of buffer overrun. I'll try disabling cpufreq support and see if I can
confirm your diagnosis.

Regards,

Nigel