Erik.Hardy@SEI.CMU.EDU (09/14/88)
anyone out there experienced this problem? i am running x11r2 on a microvax 2 with a color gpx (8 bit planes). when i log out, just as x is about to start up again, the screen goes black and remains unresponsive to any input. it doesn't appear to fully halt; it just makes the machine apparently dead. we have tried switching out all of the hardware, including a new back plane. when we put the gpx on a microvax 3, the same thing happened, but reducing the number of bit planes to 4 seemed to solve it. the dec engineer can't think of anything else to try in hardware, so she thinks it must be the software. she says, in fact, that there is a known bug in x10, in that, when it starts up, it can trash the screen. btw, this problem occurs intermittently, i.e. there seems to be no pattern as to when it crashes or not. has anyone experienced a similar problem? is it true about the "known bug" with x10? if so, could it be that this bug wasn't fixed in x11? thanks in advance, erik@sei.cmu.edu yaccity yacc (don't awk back)
yba@arrow.bellcore.com (Mark Levine) (09/16/88)
In article <8809132324.AA01705@di.sei.cmu.edu> Erik.Hardy@SEI.CMU.EDU writes: > >anyone out there experienced this problem? > >i am running x11r2 on a microvax 2 with a color gpx (8 bit planes). when i >log out, just as x is about to start up again, the screen goes black and >remains unresponsive to any input. it doesn't appear to fully halt; it just It definitely happens under Ultrix 2.2 from time to time; I have not yet seen it under 2.3, and only started seeing it after using xroot to tile the root window with a large image (fullmoon). Given the display of random garbage that appears to flash across the screen just before the lock-out, I would check the software, probably the qdss device driver, first. Getting DEC to part with source code for this can be a wonderful experience -- probably best off just filling out an SPR. I would guess it is a resource management problem that results in absolute garbage being sent to the display. Ultrix 3.0 is supposed to include X11/DecWindows as a supported product (90 days from now or so, but I sure do not speak for DEC), and they might be more willing to look at it then. I run Ultrix 2.3 on a Vaxstation II/GPX 8 plane with 11 MB main memory. Seems easier to get the problem with 4 MB, and with your observation about the 4-plane unit, it sounds like it really is a memory resource management problem. If you (anyone) can find a way to positively reproduce the behavior on demand, please let me know. Currently using X11R2. I have never seen this on anything except the qdss (GPX).