Re: [tlug] troubleshooting lockup

[scott <scott@example.com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 09:00 -0400, Jim wrote:

> I think you were better off when you described the conditions 
> under which stuff locked up. Let the lockup be your problem, 
> leaving your eyes open to more possibilities for the cause 
> of the problem. 

At first I thought the lockup was caused because of the way I have my
filesystem setup (LVMs on software raid 5), so to troubleshoot I moved
the /tmp filesystem to its own sata drive which was not on Raid or LVM.
That didn't change anything however. Next I tried disabling SE linux,
and after that tried playing around with low level settings related to
disks and audio in the BIOS, but still the phenomena occurred. Following
that I tried several different media playing applications, including
Kaffeine, Mplayer and Xine, and all caused system freeze when using
Alsa. I tried these applications in a non KDE environment as well but
still the same error. I determined the only way to prevent the freeze
was when using oss in any of the above applications. So after the above
mentioned analysis and troubleshooting of the lockup, I believe the
issue is Alsa related.

> Capture to something more permanent than stdio next time, 
> so that you can study it, and so that you can show it to 
> others for comments. 

What I would like to do now is set up a virtual server within this
server to actually capture the strace output, so when it crashes I don't
have to physically reboot. I downloaded Xen, but it appears that this
software is not like vmware in that you actually have to boot from the
Xen environment first and then setup your machines, so this doesn't look
like a solution. I tried to do a debian style debootstrap but so far no
luck in setting it up as a virtual machine on centos4. 

I'm going to play around with it some more tonight, and hopefully I can
get something going to do more extensive analysis of the bug. 

Incidentally, I'm a newbie to strace- the process number of xmms was
8981 so I did the following command: 

#strace -p 8981 -q

How would experienced strace users go about this?

Thanks again for the advice,

Scott VanDusen