After trying to run X on a machine I started having short hangs where the cursor vanished for a while. Looking at my dmesg I spotted the following: Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue You probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips NMI: IOCK error (debug interrupt?) CPU: 1 EIP: 0023:[<085273e9>] EFLAGS: 00003212 eax: 085ab9b0 ebx: 402271e4 ecx: 00000018 edx: d8d8d8d8 esi: d8d8d8d8 edi: 00000000 ebp: bffff2c8 esp: bffff240 ds: 002b es: 002b ss: 002b Process X (pid: 952, stackpage=c40f7000) With XFree86 3.3.6 everything is fine -> might be best to just make Xconfigurator use 3.3.6 with this chip. Here's the details of the board: 00:13.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 210888CX [Mach64 CX] (rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA]) 00:13.0 Class 0300: 1002:4358 (rev 01) Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster- SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping+ SERR- FastB2B- Status: Cap- 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- Region 0: Memory at fe000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8M] Expansion ROM at febf0000 [disabled] [size=64K] In a related problem, XFree only supports 8bpp on this chip, and the installer apparently tries to use 16. Probably not worth special-casing old chips like this in anaconda, though.
NMI sounds kernel related to me.. reassigning.
NMI is just a message from your hardware saying "Oh shit". it's the kernel that catches it and prints it.... nothing more
I had the same problem year and a half ago. It was something trivial but I can't remember exactly....it could be one of the options in XF86Config-4 file....I think there was an option about depth that was changed in 4.0x from 3.3.6...I had the old form either in the config file or as an option to X in /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers file. The depth should be described by an option like "Depth 16" in the Display subsection.
hardware or xserver config