From P5B SE to P5B VM SE

2010 Nov 3 at 03:55 » Tagged as :toast, motherboard, x11, gae,

On October fourth, nearly a month ago, I tweeted about a toasted Asus P5B SE mother board and about breaking my life long habit of not claiming a warranty. It turned out to be such a waste of time. The owner of the shop from which I bought the mobo, is a decent bloke. Wish I could say the same about his staff. When I sent the motherboard there, the guy at the counter had refused to accept it saying the warranty had already expired. it had not, I spoke to him over phone and persuaded him to accept it. That's par for the course in Sri Lanka. About two weeks later he called me up to inform me that I would be getting a replacement - well that certainly is unusual, the norm is that you have to call them they never call you.

Finally got the replacement about a week ago, the P5B SE is no longer being manufactured so they had sent a P5B VM SE. I think the blame for the delay probably should goto the local agent (Epsi) rather than the shop. Things went smoothly at first, until the machine hibernated; it wouldn't resume afterwards. This is not the first time that I've had trouble with hibernate so I naturally put this down to an OS/software issue and disabled power management in both the BIOS and the OS. Again things worked fine for a while, then once Chrome died and took X Server with it. The architecture of the X system would make that nearly impossible but it did happen.

Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kernel: abrt-hook-ccpp[2797]: segfault at 0 ip 00007faef8a8b022 sp 00007fffdd9fd098 error 4 in libc-2.12.1.so[7faef8a0b000+175000]
Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kernel: Process 2797(abrt-hook-ccpp) has RLIMIT_CORE set to 1
Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kernel: Aborting core
Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kdm[1697]: X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedly
Oct 31 07:35:07 localhost kernel: NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 53, CMDre 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000001 00000001
Oct 31 07:35:08 localhost abrt[2800]: saved core dump of pid 2469 (/opt/google/chrome/chrome) to /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-1288490706-2469.new/coredump (261390336 bytes)
Oct 31 07:35:08 localhost abrtd: Directory 'ccpp-1288490706-2469' creation detected
Oct 31 07:35:09 localhost abrtd: Package 'google-chrome-beta' isn't signed with proper key
Oct 31 07:35:09 localhost abrtd: Corrupted or bad crash /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-1288490706-2469 (res:5), deleting
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: irq 16: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: P           2.6.34.7-61.fc13.x86_64 #1
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: Call Trace:
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel:   [] __report_bad_irq+0x3d/0x8c
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] note_interrupt+0x118/0x17d
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] handle_fasteoi_irq+0xa8/0xce
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] handle_irq+0x88/0x91
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] do_IRQ+0x5c/0xc3
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] ret_from_intr+0x0/0x11
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel:   [] ? mwait_idle+0x7a/0x87
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] ? mwait_idle+0x2c/0x87
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] cpu_idle+0xaa/0xe4
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] rest_init+0x7e/0x80
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] start_kernel+0x413/0x41e
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] x86_64_start_reservations+0xb3/0xb7
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] x86_64_start_kernel+0xf8/0x107
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: handlers:
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] (nv_kern_isr+0x0/0x5e [nvidia])
Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: Disabling IRQ #16
Oct 31 07:35:36 localhost kdm[1697]: X server startup timeout, terminating
Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kernel: abrt-hook-ccpp[2797]: segfault at 0 ip 00007faef8a8b022 sp 00007fffdd9fd098 error 4 in libc-2.12.1.so[7faef8a0b000+175000]Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kernel: Process 2797(abrt-hook-ccpp) has RLIMIT_CORE set to 1Oct 31 07:35:06 localhost kernel: Aborting coreOct 31 07:35:06 localhost kdm[1697]: X server for display :0 terminated unexpectedlyOct 31 07:35:07 localhost kernel: NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 53, CMDre 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000001 00000001Oct 31 07:35:08 localhost abrt[2800]: saved core dump of pid 2469 (/opt/google/chrome/chrome) to /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-1288490706-2469.new/coredump (261390336 bytes)Oct 31 07:35:08 localhost abrtd: Directory 'ccpp-1288490706-2469' creation detectedOct 31 07:35:09 localhost abrtd: Package 'google-chrome-beta' isn't signed with proper keyOct 31 07:35:09 localhost abrtd: Corrupted or bad crash /var/spool/abrt/ccpp-1288490706-2469 (res:5), deletingOct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: irq 16: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: Pid: 0, comm: swapper Tainted: P           2.6.34.7-61.fc13.x86_64 #1Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: Call Trace:Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel:   [] __report_bad_irq+0x3d/0x8cOct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] note_interrupt+0x118/0x17dOct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] handle_fasteoi_irq+0xa8/0xceOct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] handle_irq+0x88/0x91Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] do_IRQ+0x5c/0xc3Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] ret_from_intr+0x0/0x11Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel:   [] ? mwait_idle+0x7a/0x87Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] ? mwait_idle+0x2c/0x87Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] cpu_idle+0xaa/0xe4Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] rest_init+0x7e/0x80Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] start_kernel+0x413/0x41eOct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] x86_64_start_reservations+0xb3/0xb7Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] x86_64_start_kernel+0xf8/0x107Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: handlers:Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: [] (nv_kern_isr+0x0/0x5e [nvidia])Oct 31 07:35:11 localhost kernel: Disabling IRQ #16Oct 31 07:35:36 localhost kdm[1697]: X server startup timeout, terminating

On closer inspection it seems that it's not just X server that is dying. It could be caused by faulty hardware, on the other hand it could be OS related as well. I've seen gnome and GDM freeze freeze up like that while using Fedora 10 on another box. So I switched to KDE with no luck, then I tried LXDE still the problem persists. Namely the machine either gets stuck or the screen just goes blank - the only way to get it back is to power cycle. So the only conclusion is that the replacement motherboard is also faulty. Well it didn't come with the original factory packaging, I'll bet it's something that they recieved as part of a trade in deal. And I am pretty sure they are not going to replace it again.