I just wasted 3 hours of my life fixing a problem with Xorg that started after a reboot. Seriously, I didn’t change anything in software, just cleaned some of the fans on the motherboard that were getting a bit clogged with dust. Turns out the problem was the evil binary only NVidia drivers.
Xorg was chewing 100% CPU, and wouldn’t die when politely kill -9 ‘ed. I could ssh in from another box, thankfully, but after a couple of minutes, Xorg was just mindlessly spinning on CPU and I couldn’t do anything but a power-off reset.
The tipoff was some log entries like this:
(WW) NVIDIA(0): WAIT (2, 6, 0x80
Some googling (via lynx!) suggested that maybe turning off AGP would help, or maybe disabling GLX.
One of those things worked. I don’t know which, because I changed two things at once. Yes, I know I suck, and that’s really poor troubleshooting procedure. I’m over it.
If you have the same problem, try these two settings:
Section "Module" # Load "glx" EndSection Section "Device" Option "NvAGP" "0" EndSection
I think next time I’ll buy a video card with better driver support under linux.
Flaky hardware seems to be the bane of my life right now. :(