Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 55265
xscreensaver locks up the screen
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:01 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2.1) Gecko/20010901 Description of problem: When xscreensaver runs certain modules, it locks up the keyboard and screen while allowing the mouse pointer to still move. Specific modules I've verified do this are Atlantis, Bubble3D and Cage. All three modules have also been observed taking up all available CPU time. 3D Clock seems to work fine. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. select an xscreensaver module from the screensaver control panel or 2. set xscreensaver to "Random Screensaver" and wait for it to hit a buggy module 3. Actual Results: Screen locks up. No screen saver shown. Keyboard doesn't work. Mouse and pointer still function, but will not select/drag/click anything. Expected Results: xscreensaver should have worked, and then stopped when no longer needed. Additional info: See also bug #49569. It might be the same bug escaped into 7.2. Under all circumstances, the machine is accessable from the network and if the process is killed off quickly enough, the machine returns to normal. Also, all occurences of this bug have happened using GNOME (default packages, not Ximian). Untested with KDE.
Sounds like a bug in the DRI support for your graphics card. What card are you using?
ATI Expert 128 AGP with 16 Meg of RAM. This might also explain why chromium locks my system up as well (haven't reported that bug yet...).
I'm not going to close the bug just yet, but it seems that this is disturbingly similar to bug #33581. I am using an ATI r128 chipset with 16 meg of memory, running at 1280x1024x24 with DRI enabled. I guess the only remaining question is why Xconfigurator still allows this borken behavior?
Yes, you absolutely can not use DRI on a 16Mb card with such a setup. Xconfigurator allows it, because ultimately it is a video driver problem. If the drivers are fixed to allow dynamic reallocation of video resources, and Xconfigurator is written to disallow such setups, then Xconfigurator will not work in valid setups in future. The real fix, will be when XFree86 matures to disable DRI on its own (in the short term), and handle the situation more like Windows does in the long term. DOes using 1024x768x16 fix the problem?
I went to 1280x1024x16 w/DRI, and all seems well. All of the previously mentioned xscreensaver modules work OK, and chromium now works as well. I suppose this bug should be left open until fixed once and for all, but I believe that this problem is solved for my specific case. Thanks!
Ok, I'm closing the bug then. The issue is very well known, and there are numerous bugs open still that document it. Xconfigurator is planned to default to not allowing known DRI problematic configs in the future, however as stated already, it is an X video driver problem, in combination with a resource allocation issue. They are not small bugs, but rather a core X design issue. They'll likely be addressed in the 4.3.0 era of XFree86.