++ 29/10/04 19:31 +0100 - <Alan J. Flavell>:

Hey Michael,

> On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Michael David Joy wrote:
>
> > You might try booting with with the noacpi optoin. or acpi=off.
>
> Thanks!  That sounds a useful idea, bearing in mind that I have
> to use acpi=off on these laptops in order to be able to boot Knoppix
> successfully.  (It's an IBM R40e).
>
> > I've noticed that the windows intel drivers and windows atheros
> > drivers would do this from time to time on a few of the laptops I've
> > worked on. I think it may be due to the fact that the ndiswrapper
> > can't pass power management events to the wireless card properly.
>
> As a point of information, although I've no idea if it's directly
> relevant: if I issue "iwconfig eth1" then in the resulting report the
> Power Management parameter is shown as "off".  ("eth1" in this case is
> the Wireless card, as you guessed).
>
> > Although running without ACPI on a laptop is far from optimal, you
> > might give it a go.
>
> I'll report anything useful that I find.  Thanks.
>
>
> Folks: Apologies if I was the only one to be unaware of this Morse
> Code joke.  I've learned one thing new today, anyway ;-) but as far as
> I can see, the incident leaves nothing interesting in /var/log
>
> Perhaps I need a "magic sysreq".  These are areas I haven't really
> explored before.  Haven't done kernel hacking / interrupt handling
> stuff since IBM VM/370 or so  ;-)

Definately you'll want magic sysrq keys. They are very handy when it comes to
getting a fairly clean filesystem when you need to force a reboot (sysrq-s,
sysrq-u, sysrq-b).

Also, if you have a frozen system, you can get a task list dump. Redirecting
that to serial sometimes helps narrow down the offending program/function.

Also memory dumps via sysrq is handy to see if memory exhaustion exists and
Linux is not killing off the process in time. Stuff like that.

John

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