[BUG] Intermittent screen lockup, no display signal

Hello,

Sometimes, using the Xonotic 0.6.0 client, my screen goes black in the middle of a game. Shortly after, my display starts looking for a signal on the digital connection indicating that it lost the analog signal, the analog signal being what I use. At that point I can't ctrl+alt+fx to another tty so I can't kill the process and I need to do a hard reboot. Most of the time the game runs like a champ though.

This occurs on Debian unstable with the r600g driver for a radeonhd 4890. I use the radeon.pcie_gen2=1 boot parameter, start the game with vblank_mode=0 and have ColorTiling and ColorTiling2D to true in my xorg.conf. SwapBuffersWait is false. All else is default.

I always start the client from cli but there's nothing notable in .bash_history. Any ideas wha might cause this or how to resolve it? Does Xonotic leave any logs?

Thanks.


edit:
I'll log stdout and stderr to a file and wait for a crash to happen.

You can log Xonotic by setting the log_file variable in the Xonotic console (shift escape): log_file abcdef.log will make the game copy its output to $HOME/.xonotic/data/abcdef.log. (By the way, .bash_history only keeps a log of the commands in bash, not their output.)

Anyway, does this problem also occur in windowed mode? That might be worth trying.

For what its worth you can exit Xonotic at any time by pressing F10. Hope this makes things a little easier than rebooting! Does this bring the analogue signal back?

Have you tried connecting up the DVI signal? What happens then? Do you lose DVI signal at all or only the analogue?

It would seem unlikely that this a hardware problem but I have experience before with cards whose video signal weakens when in 3D mode due to heavier power drain from the GPU causing the signal to be lost but that is generally only temporary.

Not sure if you are willing to try the proprietary fglrx driver and see what happens?

Also is anything interesting in /var/log/* from the event?

You can log Xonotic by setting the log_file variable in the Xonotic console (shift escape): log_file abcdef.log will make the game copy its output to $HOME/.xonotic/data/abcdef.log. (By the way, .bash_history only keeps a log of the commands in bash, not their output.)

Anyway, does this problem also occur in windowed mode? That might be worth trying.

I'll switch on logging like you suggest. I haven't tried windowed mode. Will do if logging produces no useful results.

For what its worth you can exit Xonotic at any time by pressing F10. Hope this makes things a little easier than rebooting! Does this bring the analogue signal back?

Have you tried connecting up the DVI signal? What happens then? Do you lose DVI signal at all or only the analogue?

It would seem unlikely that this a hardware problem but I have experience before with cards whose video signal weakens when in 3D mode due to heavier power drain from the GPU causing the signal to be lost but that is generally only temporary.

Not sure if you are willing to try the proprietary fglrx driver and see what happens?

Also is anything interesting in /var/log/* from the event?

There is no noticeable response to F10. Nothing is connected to DVI. If I could find that DVI adapter thingie ... I'll look around for it and try DVI if I can.

I will not be trying fglrx, sorry. Unstable gets quite frequent kernel updates and I don't want to deal with that painful fglrx all the time.

Any ideas on what /var/logs to look at? I don't see anything strange at the moment but I'll look again when I get another crash.


What I should also have mentioned is that sound also stops so it seems that the entire process locks up.

Anyway, I've got some things to try now. Thanks.

I think it's this bug
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295164