From: dohm@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Peter J Dohm)
Subject: X bombing *occationally*
Summary: XFree Bombs every now and then for no apparent reason
Keywords: XFree xfree X11
Organization: The Ohio State University
Distribution: comp
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 19:30:35 GMT

Hi all...

FIRST: I've been with linux since *nearly* the beginning of its public
release, and love it dearly.  I feel really proud showing linux to those
that feel that intel's machines have NO good operating systems available.
Who needs a sun??? My 486 is running X a WHOLE lot faster than a networked
sparcstation SLC (yeah they're slow, but...) running X11R5 in MONO.  ;)
Kudos to all who've helped make linux into a *stable*, efficient, usable
operating system.  Kudos to those who've ported X and made an intel based
computer an option for a whole lotta people who wanna run X well.

Now onto my problem.

I generally don't post unless it's *really* bizarre.
I usually can figure out just about anything, but this one
has me a bit stumped.  I can run X 7 times out of ten with NO problems 
what so ever.  On the 8th through 10th times, I either have one of two things
happen:

a) it says that no clock exists for the current display mode

   each time I run x, it gives a different list of clocks available
   for my STB powergraph 1024x768 tseng et4000 based card with 1 Mb.
   I am required to have about 6 different speeds for each screen mode,
   because I can't ever be sure which ones will come up on each execution
   of the server.  Sometimes none do.  Hmmm....  (also, how can a clock
   be a 0?  Sometimes one of the clocks goes from 63 to 0 from one run to
   the next...)

or

b) it completely bombs just as the first client tries to open a window

   the output looks like the following:
   ------------------------------------------
   Creating TCP socket: Invalid argument

   XFree86 Version 1.1 / X Window System
   (protocol Version 11, revision 0, vendor release 5000)
   Configured drivers:
     VGA256 (256 colour SVGA):
         et4000, et3000, pvga1, gvga, ati, tvga8900
   VGA256: et4000 (mem: 1024k numclocks: 16)
   VGA256:   clocks: 25 28 59 49 40 48 50 66 16 14 32 22 20 24  0 38
   VGA256: SpeedUp mode selected (Flags=0x3f)

   waiting for X server to shut down XIO:  fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) on X server ":0.0"
         after 6 requests (2 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
         The connection was probably broken by a server shutdown or KillClient.
   XIO:  fatal IO error 32 (Broken pipe) on X server ":0.0"
         after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.
         The connection was probably broken by a server shutdown or KillClient.

   xinit:  Interrupted system call (errno 4):  Client error.
   twm:  unable to open display ":0"
   Error: Can't open display: :0
   Error: Can't open display: :0
   Error: Can't open display: :0

----------------------------------------------------

   This all occurs *after* i've already seen the X root and cursor (with
   active mouse) appear.  Is this some kind of bizarre bug in the server,
   or have I somehow done something (God knows what) incorrectly?
   I figured maybe somewhere it picks a random (who knows why) root
   descriptor??? (not possible??? that's what I think, but I'm not enough
   of an authority on X to know)

   The statistics i've taken show that in about 98 percent of the cases
   where problem a) occurs, it's pretty sure that problem a) will re-occur
   if I run X again, and problem b) becomes almost a certainty if a) had
   occurred since a reboot.

   Most of the time a reboot seems to solve the problems i've got, and I can
   go about my business using X without problems (until about the 7th time
   i run it ;).

I'm running 0.98-pl1 with the standard X11-2.0 XFree86 distribution.  I simply
typed startx (which has the no TCP switch set in it).  I've got an OPTI
chipset in case that matters.  Also, I've got 16Mb memory, and an Adaptec 1542b
(can't imagine that being the problem, but you *never* know)
I've got /dev/console correctly set.  All things that are supposed to have
the suid bit set do.  The only thing i'm not sure about is that the sockets
created in /tmp are owned by root, not the user.  I think that's correct,
since the server is running suid root, right?

I'd appreciate any help that anyone can offer.  (it's really embarrasing to
show someone how nice X runs, and then have it bomb on you ;)

Peter Dohm

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+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Peter J. Dohm - Comp. Science Major    |    The Ohio State University    |
| ** dohm@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu **    |   ak541@cleveland.freenet.edu   |
| dohm.1@osu.edu, dohm@cis.ohio-state.edu |  dohm@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+