From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98) Description of problem: After installation, I attempted to login to the system (using gdm), selecting the KDE session. The KDE splash appears, but the system freezes when the panel is loading. The mouse cursor and keyboard appear to work, but X simply stops. Hard drive light remains lit, but no activity. Switching to other ttys is possible (and keyboard appears to work), but the login prompt does not respond to input. Soft reset is not possible, and hard reset is only possible by cycling master power switch. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: use test system with Matrox Mystique 4MB and AWE64 sound card 1. install Redhat 7.2, but remove X Windows Classic from package list 2. allow kudzu to set up all devices on first boot. 3. attempt to login with either KDE or GNOME. Actual Results: Complete system freeze (keyboard and mouse still work, but system does not respond to input) on all terminals. Expected Results: a normal login. Additional info: I am using XFree 4.1, using the mga driver. I have a Matrox Mystique 4MB and Soundblaster AWE64 sound card. After rebooting, I attempted to login using a GNOME session. The same problem appears, only when the 'GNOME loading: done.' message appears. Incidentally, in both of these situtations, the freeze appears to happen at the moment when some sort of startup sound might be played. Checking /var/log/messages reveals a number of modprobe errors (after login), but I do not know if these are the cause of the problem. There are usually several, and they say things to the effect of "modprobe: modprobe: cannot locate module sound-slot-0-0", "modprobe: modprobe: cannot locate module sound-service-1-0", and so forth. I tried running sndconfig. sndconfig correctly detects the sound card and plays both the FM synth file and the midi file correctly. This does not appear to alleviate the problem, however. Disabling gdm and using startx to load X does not appear to make a difference, either. I _can_ load X using the manager-less Failsafe session. X appears to function normally here, so I suspect it is a sound problem. However, I cannot isolate the cause, as the problem causes a system freeze and leaves no other error messages other than those described above. It is also possible that it is a kudzu problem, though I don't know how to diagnose it.
Is this with the 2.4.7 kernel or with the updated 2.4.9 kernel ?
Upgrading to the 2.4.9-7 packages apparently doesn't resolve the problem. The lock up happens in exactly the same way. /var/log/messages shows a different error this time, though: 'modprobe: modprobe: can't locate module char-major-81'. Also, the last message in the log before reboot is the gnome-name-server starting, in the GNOME case.
I'm starting to think this isn't a kernel problem. I can get sound to play using XMMS in failsafe mode. X appears to work fine in failsafe mode, so there must be a problem with both GNOME and KDE. Maybe there is a permissions problem?
New info: there is an additional message in /var/log/messages that pops up only occasionally, and it is the last message before the failure. It is 'kernel: ide-floppy driver 0.97.sv'. It is possible there is an IRQ conflict with the floppy drive? It know that Nautilus automatically scans drives when it sets up the desktop, so this is probably why the floppy driver is getting loaded here. I tried to disable access to the floppy drive in /etc/fstab, but kudzu keeps putting its line back in. I'm going to try to do some floppy operations in X and see if I can reproduce the freeze.
Okay, there appears to be either an address or an IRQ conflict between the floppy drive and the sound card. After mounting an ext2 floppy, the sound card will no longer work. I will try to resolve the conflict. Is kudzu supposed to catch this sort of thing?
Actually, I don't believe this is a device conflict now. Sorry for the lengthy rambling so far, but I believe I've finally found the source of the problem. I checked all of the addresses, DMAs, and IRQs allocated to the floppy drive and sound card. There is no overlap. Believing that I might have inadvertantly done something naughty, and started over from scratch. I reinstalled 7.2, and then applied all update packages for 7.2 that are available. I then attempted to start GNOME from gdm, and it locked up exactly the same way as before. The same happens in KDE, only it occurs while the desktop is loading, and only when the CDROM and Floppy icons appear. So, I rebooted, and then switched to tty1, and logged in as root. I mounted the cdrom manually, and then logged in using gdm. The desktop came up without a problem. No crashes whatsoever. Incidentally, I noticed that while running the init.d scripts, the autofs script shows the following error: No Mountpoints Defined. Perhaps autofs in not configured properly by the installation program, or by kudzu? So, this problem probably needs to be filed under autofs instead of kernel.