[Wine] Re: Wine crashes the whole system with 3D games

[Robert M. Riches Jr.]

On 2007-02-09, Roger-BH <rogeriovinhal at yahoo.com.br> wrote:
> Hi, I am running Ubuntu 6.10 AMD64 in an Athlon64 3500+ with a ATI
> Radeon 9600XT with fglrx fully configured.
>
> I have installed wine using the i386 package and installing the ia32
> libs. It runs alright, DIablo II works better than Windows. But I am
> having quite an issue with 3D Games.
>
> I tested Warcraft III and MOHAA Breakthrough. Both of them look very
> nice anti-aliased and smoother than in Windows, but after some time,
> usually less than 5 minutes, these games lock hard the system. Nothing
> works, making me press the Reset button in order to restart.
>
> This is driving me crazy, I can't find a solution, this problem is so
> strange... Everything works fine, no graphic errors, no lags, an then
> suddenly the screen freezes, the sound continue going with some
> errors, until it stops completely.
>
> I've tried to run without sound, but the problem was still there.
>
> Is there something I can do to solve this or to get more information
> about it?

You're not the same person who posted a similar situation
several days ago, are you?  Actually, I don't remember what
application that person was using, but the symptoms sound
similar.  My guess, having a bit of experience with similar
symptoms outside of Wine, is that the DRI/DRM portion of
your X server and graphics card driver are causing the
lock-up.  In theory, Wine itself can't take down the rest of
the system unless there's a system-level flaw.

The first thing to do is isolate whether the kernel itself
is locking up, or whether it's just the X server.  Do you
have another machine on your LAN you can ping the target
machine with?  See if it quits responding to pings when the
game locks up the machine.  If it quits answering pings,
then the kernel is jammed.  If it answers pings, you can ssh
in and do a clean reboot.  You might also try the magic
SysRq key combinations.  If the kernel is jammed, there's
not much to do other than press the reset button.

The easiest to remedy would be if the root cause is bad
system RAM.  Run memtest86 overnight (or for a couple of
days if possible) to test.

It might possibly be bad graphics card hardware that's
wiping out the graphics card driver.  Swapping to a
different graphics card is likely the only practical way to
test for that.

More than likely, there's a bug in the graphics card driver
and/or X server.  Changing X configuration options might
make the problem go away, but likely not without reducing
graphics performance significantly.  An updated graphics
card driver might fix it (or might introduce new problems).
The next release of your OS distribution might fix the
problem (or might introduce new problems).

HTH

-- 
Robert Riches
spamtrap42 at verizon.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)