Bug#441699: freezes system

[Tomas Pospisek]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2007, Jordà Polo wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 12:24:07AM +0200, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
>> All those 3D apps are very slow. However they do not slow the system that
>> much down as to no more being stoppable. I f.ex. enjoy playing crack-attack
>> with minimum detail. Neverball starts and crawls along in the menu screen
>> (showing some 3D rendered scenes in the background) and can be killed.
>> However neverputt doesn't do anything visible other than emiting those
>> "sporadic" notes and slows the system down to a near freeze...
>>
>> $ glxinfo | grep direct
>> direct rendering: No (If you want to find out why, try setting
>> LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose)
>> OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect
>
> The system shouldn't slow down like that, but it is also true that you are
> supposed to play the game with a 3D-capable card/driver. Will you be able to
> play the game even if there is no freeze? I doubt it, so I'm not sure if
> there is something to fix here, or if it is worth it.
>
> Anyway, I tried to reproduce your problem on a slow machine without direct
> rendering (it was an ati card though). It "worked": it was _really_ slow, I
> couldn't play at all, but I could see the menu and didn't notice a freeze of
> the system.

Umm well. As I said, when I just start neverputt, apart from playing the 
sound it does not seem to do anything *at all* as it's showing the menu 
selection. Nonetheless it accomplishes to successfully "stop" the system. 
That could go under "when executing makes the system unusable".

Of course it's a performance issue: someone has managed to implement a 
loop that polls like a demented berzerk.

> With the information provided so far, this looks more like a
> hardware/driver/configuration problem to me.

In a way you might be right, most 3D games seem to boost CPU consumption 
to 100% even if they're idling. However neverball is the worst I've seen 
so far - were the system even a little less responsive, I would have had 
to powercycle the PC, nevermind any unsaved work.

So the question for me would be: is neverball polling insanely? Or is 
it below neverball? Or is it both? If it's below neverball and neverball 
just somehow manages to trigger the insanity in a specially pathologic 
way, then who is consuming 100% CPU? Is it X? The nv driver? The opengl SW 
driver?
*t

-- 
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   Tomas Pospisek
   http://sourcepole.com -  Linux & Open Source Solutions
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