On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:23:31 -0000, El Tux <nope@spamsucks.invalid>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:19:06 -0400, Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
>[color=green]
>> On Sat, 29 Mar 2008 01:12:00 -0500, DFS wrote:
>>[color=darkred]
>>> "I have just started experiencing totally random lockups. It's locked
>>> up so bad I can't even cnt-alt-f1 to a tty. The keyboard does nothing.
>>> I can wiggle the mouse around for a while then eventually it stops
>>> working too. Nothing in the logs looks amiss. This has been happening
>>> for 3 days now.
>>>
>>> This is on a feisty install that's been stable for 6 months. I
>>> dual-boot to XP, XP never locks up. So I don't think it's hardware."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> [url]http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=587905&highlight=freeze&page=13[/url][/color][/color]
>
>Any time I encounter random lockups in Linux, my first suspicion is bad
>RAM or hard drive, and my second is a bad DSDT (see below).
>[color=green]
>>
>> It's Linux, specifically Ubuntu.
>>
>> They have about 70 pages on the site about Ubuntu locking up.[/color]
>
>That's 70 pages containing a handful of complaints and consisting mostly
>of discussion and suggestions for tracing and fixing the problem, but of
>course the lying MS shills want any visitors here to believe it's 70
>pages of nothing but complaints. Nothing new there, but here's something
>interesting for my fellow Linux users: One of the major causes of random
>lockups under Linux is bad ACPI info provided by faulty DSDT's compiled
>by Microsoft's ASL compiler. A more detailed description of the problem,
>along with a general procedure for fixing it, can be found here:
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>[url]http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Fix_Common_ACPI_Problems[/url]
>
>"The ACPI Specification defines the requirements for the DSDT (and
>everything else, for that matter) pretty explicitly. Intel's ASL
>compiler, iasl, used to compile the DSDT to AML from ASL, will throw
>errors and warnings if the underlying ASL is buggy. Unfortunately,
>Microsoft's ASL compiler allows many of these errors and warnings to
>sneak by. As a result, many OEMs write buggy DSDTs, and it turns out
>that Windows is very forgiving of bugs in the DSDT that get by
>Microsoft's compiler (not surprisingly)."
>
>"What this means is that a DSDT that does not conform to the ACPI
>specification will work under Windows, even though it
>shouldn't. However, when you try to use it in Linux, where the ACPI
>developers expect that the DSDT is written to comply with the standard
>(and the Intel ASL compiler), the buggy sections of the DSDT are
>unsupported. If you have a buggy DSDT, ACPI may not be aware that
>certain devices exist. Or, if it is aware, it may not support all of
>their capabilites. If you have either of these symptoms (missing or
>incompletely supported functionality in /proc/acpi), then the cause may
>be a buggy DSDT."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Nearly every random-lockup problem that I've been able to trace on Linux
>systems was found to be due either to faulty hardware or to a faulty
>DSDT that was fixed by decompiling, fixing, and recompiling the code as
>outlined on the above-mentioned webpage. The latter was caused not by
>bad Linux programming, but by vendors' errors that "slipped through"
>Microsoft's ASL compiler - whose faulty output Microsoft "just happens"
>to ignore in their own code. Not that I'm accusing them of anything. No,
>I'm sure it's just a coincidence, just like all the other coincidences
>that unintentionally cripple competitors and make it appear to be their
>own fault...
>
>There is an effort to replace the faulty DSDT's with working ones, and
>other groups are working on bypassing the DSDT the way Windows does, so
>some distro's or releases might have problems where others don't. Also,
>updates with new features that utilize some previously-unused section of
>the DSDT that contains an error can cause random lockups or other odd
>symptoms where they didn't exist in earlier versions.[/color]

I've been running the same XP OS for over 3 years and not one lock up.