From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031114 Epiphany/1.0.4 Description of problem: While trying to determine what XFree86 was doing, I ran 'strace -f -p <pid>' on it. I got a few lines of unsurprising output and then the machine froze up. I connected to the machine remotely and kill -9 X, which returned the machine to a usable state. I can reproduce this at will on several machines, and will include magic-sysrq task list output from a machine in the frozen state. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): XFree86-4.3.0-42 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. start X windows 2. run 'strace -f -p <pid>', where <pid> is the PID of the X binary 3. watch the machine freeze after spitting out some output. 4. if the machine doesn't freeze on its own, move the mouse. Actual Results: the machine is unresponsive, except for network connections. Expected Results: strace should have shown process output until I hit ctrl-c. the machine shouldn't have frozen. Additional info:
Created attachment 97111 [details] magic sysrq output of a machine in the frozen state
Created attachment 97112 [details] magic sysrq task list output, round 2
When attempting to debug the X server, or any of its modules, you must not run the debugging software from within the X server you are attempting to debug/strace/etc. You must run the X server alone, and run the debugger/strace/etc. from a remote network session or serial console, or other access mechanism. Closing as NOTABUG.
gotcha. thanks! -lars