Dom3 crashes my Linux laptop

g1ul10 · #1 February 3rd, 2009, 07:06 PM

Simply starting dom3 on my Gentoo linux laptop crashes the system. It's several months I have this problem. I've got an Intel GM965 graphic card and I run xorg version 7.2. I've patched dom3 with 3.20b. Does anyone else had this problem? Any help? Thanks in advance.

ramarren · #2 February 4th, 2009, 02:23 AM

For me Dominions3 runs with no problems on laptop with Gentoo, Intel GMA950 graphics, Xorg 7.2, Mesa 7.3 and xf86-video-intel 2.5.1-r1.

What do you mean exactly by "crashes"? In my experience most outright system freezes are driver related, with Intel audio drivers more likely a culprit... what is your audio setup? Try running dom3 with "-s -m" options to disable sound and music.

g1ul10 · #3 February 4th, 2009, 04:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ramarren

For me Dominions3 runs with no problems on laptop with Gentoo, Intel GMA950 graphics, Xorg 7.2, Mesa 7.3 and xf86-video-intel 2.5.1-r1.

Nice to know! Thank you for your reply, maybe you can help me. Actually dom3 worked perfectly on my laptop until a few months ago (don't remember exactly when problems started). Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems you are using masked packages. Indeed the version of mesa I run is 6.5 and the version of intel driver 2.1.1 Pretty older than yours. So hopefully updating to your config will solve my issue. Could you please post your /etc/portage/package.use file?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ramarren

What do you mean exactly by "crashes"? In my experience most outright system freezes are driver related, with Intel audio drivers more likely a culprit... what is your audio setup? Try running dom3 with "-s -m" options to disable sound and music.

By "crashes" I mean the X session first freezes, ignoring keyboard and mouse, then it crashes forcing me to a console, which in turn becomes unresponsive and I'm finally greeted with a black screen... I've to hard reboot to restart the system. And yes, it's definitely a video problem: running doom3 with the switches you suggested doesn't change its behaviour at all.

ramarren · #4 February 4th, 2009, 05:22 AM

Weird... I don't think I have seen that sort of crash. Running out of memory/swap sometimes has similar results, but Dominions3 doesn't take that much for startup.

Anyway, I don't have anything graphics related in package.use, and in make.conf I have VIDEO_CARDS="vesa vga i810 i915 intel", which is a bit much, but that doesn't matter, and I don't really got which cards are i810 and which are i915... And I think at some point they changed it to "intel" anyway, but I didn't remove those before.

Anyway, I had some problems with stable intel video, and upgraded the whole thing to masked-by-~x86, including necessary parts of X system. I haven't encountered any problems with that, so it might help.

One tricky part is that some of those ebuilds need portage-2.2, so you might want to upgrade that as well. Those are hard-masked, but I haven't seen any problems, and they should be moving towards release sometime soon.

The relevant part of my package.keywords is:

Code:

#Xs
=x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel-2.6.1 ~x86 # upgraded today
=x11-base/xorg-server-1.5.2 ~x86
=x11-libs/pixman-0.12.0 ~x86
=x11-libs/libpciaccess-0.10.5 ~x86
=x11-proto/xproto-7.0.13 ~x86
=x11-apps/xauth-1.0.3 ~x86
=x11-libs/libXrender-0.9.4 ~x86
=x11-libs/libXau-1.0.4 ~x86
=x11-libs/xtrans-1.2.2 ~x86
=x11-misc/xkeyboard-config-1.4 ~x86
=x11-apps/rgb-1.0.3 ~x86
<x11-apps/xinit-1.0.9 ~x86
=x11-proto/randrproto-1.2.2 ~x86
=x11-libs/libXfont-1.3.3 ~x86
=x11-proto/renderproto-0.9.3 ~x86
=x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard-1.3.1 ~x86
=x11-drivers/xf86-video-vesa-2.0.0 ~x86
=x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse-1.3.0 ~x86
=x11-drivers/xf86-input-synaptics-0.15.2-r2 ~x86
#graphic drivers
media-libs/mesa ~x86
x11-proto/xf86driproto ~x86
x11-proto/dri2proto ~x86
x11-libs/libdrm ~x86
x11-libs/libXxf86vm ~x86
x11-libs/libX11 ~x86
x11-libs/libXext ~x86
x11-apps/mesa-progs ~x86
x11-proto/xextproto ~x86
x11-proto/inputproto ~x86

The particular versions on most of those are not that relevant, I just didn't want to have automatic updates to unstable of that many packages.

Hope this helps and doesn't completely break your system

lch · #5 February 4th, 2009, 05:32 AM

Oh man, it's like you're running the whole system on unstable software... I don't think that's necessary. If it works for him, great. Otherwise this sounds like you might have the wrong video driver in your Xorg.conf or bigger problems like hardware faults - tried memtest86+ yet?

ramarren · #6 February 4th, 2009, 05:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lch

Oh man, it's like you're running the whole system on unstable software... I don't think that's necessary. If it works for him, great. Otherwise this sounds like you might have the wrong video driver in your Xorg.conf or bigger problems like hardware faults - tried memtest86+ yet?

Oh, right... I was going to suggest that first, but kind of got carried away. And it's not the whole system, just, uh, significant part of it. And Intel open video drivers got lots of improvements recently, anyway... I wonder if that entire GEM thing in 2.6.28 kernels will actually work, they claim 50% performance improvement, and with integrated graphics every bit is useful. But testing-masked kernels are a bit too unstable for me.

Dedas · #7 February 4th, 2009, 09:12 AM

If I was you I should try Dom3 on another Linux distribution. Use a bootable one like Ubuntu. If it works ok then you know it is not hardware related and can start tracking down the software problem in Gentoo.

analytic_kernel · #8 February 4th, 2009, 10:28 AM

Do you have a choice between OpenGL implementations? If you have a choice, which are you using? Have you tried switching to the other option?

Code:

# eselect opengl list
Available OpenGL implementations:
  [1]   ati *
  [2]   xorg-x11

Johan K · #9 February 4th, 2009, 03:29 PM

Try adding this option to your device section in xorg.conf. There is a bug with FrameBufferCompression and intel graphics.

Section "Device"
Option "FrameBufferCompression" "false"

g1ul10 · #10 February 5th, 2009, 06:19 PM

Thanks for your replies.

Johan K: Option "FrameBufferCompression" does not seem to play any role: it is not recognized as an available option by the driver I use (intel).

analytic_kernel: Note that using Intel integrated graphics I don't have any opengl option but xorg-x11,

Concerning hardware, I perfectly run dominions 3 in windows vista on the same machine (it's pretty slow anyway, slower than when it worked on Linux) but I don't use vista at all and I want my preferred game on linux again. Memory is probably not an issue: the system is rather stable, I can run it for DAYS, with relatively high CPU usage and without problems. I can play other games (with and without wine simulation), watch movies, compile for hours, and I don't get a crash... apart when I try to run dom3

Now I'm reinstalling dom3 and I'm burning the last Ubuntu to see if it's able to run it without problems. Then probably I'll try ramarren's configuration.