I''m workin on a 2D game using SDL and OpenGL, and it works ok in Windows (except for a few memory leaks that I''m still workin on) but when I compiled it in Linux, it was drawing all the quads with no textures, except for just a few different stuff. Anyways, all of a sudden, it froze! Linux completely froze! I rebooted and tried to get back into Linux, but i got an error message saying the Linux partition was messed up and it was going to repair it, but NO! It couldn''t repair it! My Linux partition is all screwed up! Did I do that? Did my innocent little game screw up Linux that bad? I mean, i wasn''t even running it as root! How the nutty can something like a puny little game completely SCREW UP LINUX like that!? Is it only a matter of time before it blows Windows up too?!

The game didn't screw it up. You thought that Linux had frozen and reset the machine without a clean halt. That's what screwed it up . Linux could have died, but most of the time that you'd think that it has, it's really only X that has frozen. Luckily, it's not a big deal, even though the error messages may make it sound like one. Go into maintanence mode and run fsck manually on the device with problems, it should clean it up.

For the future: Setup a SSH server on your machine. Then, next time, if you think it froze, try these steps:

Hit alt+ctrl+backspace. You should get dumped out of X if X really didn't die.

Hit alt+ctrl+F1. If X hasn't locked the input, you can get to a terminal and kill X.

If neither of those work, go to another computer and use SSH to log into your machine. If this works, Linux did not freeze. Either kill X or reboot the machine remotely.



[edited by - Null and Void on April 10, 2002 9:08:18 PM]

So it wasn''t my game? really? joy!

but I thought Linux was supposed to be psycho-stable (expression of mine)! Course, that was the only time it has done something like that since I''ve used it (a few months).

If it wasn''t my game, what was it?

quote: Original post by BradDaBug
but I thought Linux was supposed to be psycho-stable (expression of mine)! Course, that was the only time it has done something like that since I''ve used it (a few months).

Linux is, X isn''t. To give X some credit though, X normally only dies when a driver is at fault.

quote: Original post by BradDaBug
If it wasn''t my game, what was it?

You. You reset the machine with shutting down, right? Don''t worry about it though, just remember that doing that is a bad thing (bad for your HDD, not really for anything else).

Linux is psycho stable. You can throw as many app you want at it, try to use all resource of the system, it will obviously crawl to barely usable, but it will not crash.

But, XFree can crash because of driver bugs. This is probably what happened for you.

X; possibly your game. You probably either crashed the copy of the X server you were running by the library doing something weird, or simply blocked out the keyboard and mouse, so you had no way to enter stuff into your machine.

Incidentally, this -is- a way to effectively crash linux as a user. If no cpu use restrictions are placed on the users, a user program can toast X, block IO from the peripherals, and run in the background tasks with either enough allocated memory, or enough cpu use to make the machine lag up and reject incoming networking connections.

I''ve had it happen. It sucks. Gnome-disabled (as in, ones running gnome) versions especially prone. *sighs* Even refused pings one time. All bad.

Moral: Make sure you put limits on the CPU and memory use by users.

Even though I''m using NVidia drivers?

What about sound drivers? Does X handle that? I have a stupid integrated AC97 sound "card," and I don''t know where Mandrake came up with the drivers for it.

quote: Original post by BradDaBug
Even though I''m using NVidia drivers?

Yes. The NVidia drivers are nice, but it''s software, and thus error prone. There is actually a list of known bugs on the NVidia website, one of them you might have triggered.

As for your textures not showing, remember that Linux is case sensitive, so it might have failed to load them if the name isn''t correct.

quote:
What about sound drivers? Does X handle that?

No, X is a display server. On Linux, you have multiple choices for sound, though I''d tend to recommand ALSA.

quote:
I have a stupid integrated AC97 sound "card," and I don''t know where Mandrake came up with the drivers for it.

I guess the RH kernel (and thus Mandrake''s) comes with OSS/Free, or maybe ALSA, which probably has drivers for that "card". Look into /lib/modules/[kernel-version]/misc, you should see a sound driver in there.

Considering you''re an NVidia user, you might have run into a known problem if you''re using an AMD CPU. There are some problems with how page tables are set up for accessing the memory on the card or something like this, which leads to complete lockup (yes, complete lockup) when running OpenGL apps.
Booting the kernel with the "mem=nopentium" option is a possible workaround.

cu,
Prefect

Yeah, I have an Athlon.

I tried going into maintanance mode and running fsck, and it appeared to work. It fixed buches of junk.

When I tried to boot normally, it says the same stuff is wrong.

I played the Quake 3 demo in Linux and it ran fine. Never crashed. Well, except when I tried to play with sound. I had to disable sound to get it to run.