Re: non core dump crashes

On 20 Jun 2002, tony wrote:

>Date: 20 Jun 2002 17:33:20 +0200
>From: tony <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Content-Type: text/plain
>List-Id: Neomagic driver development and testing. <neomagic.XFree86.Org>
>Subject: non core dump crashes
>
>Egbert,
>
>Since I have moved to Red Hat 7.3 I am having X crashes upon quitting
>apps. Stock Red Hat and Gnome. Updated through Up2Date.
>
>This looks very much like a memory related issue.
>
>It happens when quitting VMware (still doesn't work on the Vaio internal
>screen) or Mozilla 1.0

VMware inserts kernel modules into the running kernel, which are 
known in some cases to cause kernel crashes.  Red Hat does not 
officially support running Red Hat Linux inside VMware, nor 
running VMware in Red Hat Linux.  The reason being that it is not 
possible to support 3rd party kernel modules which can modify 
intentionally or unintentionally the running kernel.

I don't know if the XFree86 team officially supports problems
which manifest when VMware is used, however in order to maximize
your potential chance of having the problem looked into and
potentially getting a solution, the usual advice we give to those
experiencing problems when VMware is being used, is to remove the
possibility that VMware is involved in the problem out of the
equation.  Temporarily configure your system so that the VMware
modules do not get started at all at boot time, then reboot.  
Once the kernel comes up without the VMware modules, try to
reproduce the problem behaviour.  Note: simply quitting VMware 
and rmmod'ing the modules is not sufficient, you must physically 
reboot the machine to have a cleanly booted kernel.

If you can reproduce the problem still, then it most likely is
not a problem related to using VMware.  If the problem is not 
reproduceable without VMware being used, then it is likely caused 
by VMware somehow.

This will probably give a useful datapoint for helping to 
isolate the problem.

Hope this helps.


-- 
Mike A. Harris                  Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer             190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
XFree86 maintainer              Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
Red Hat Inc.
http://www.redhat.com           ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris