"Random" freezes occurred after a few minutes of use with the receipt of
a NMI interrupt. The display and keyboard were frozen but the mouse
cursor moved. This happened twice. The computer had run Fedora Core 8
and Windows XP Pro within the week without any problems.

I installed the ATI driver version (restricted) suggested by Ubuntu and
haven't had the problem since (about 18 hours of use).  No other changes
by me.

Factoids:

Ubuntu 7.10, clean install with patches applied.
Added Eclipse and Java SDK 6.
The computer is a Dell 4700 with an ATI Radeon X300.

The last kernel messages before the freeze were:
kernel: [ 533.620610] Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason b1 on CPU 0.
kernel: [ 533.620617] You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus.
kernel: [ 533.620619] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

(I have the full syslog sequence for the pre-crash and post-fix boots if
that is of interest.)

(Ubuntu newbie guess follows...)  This makes me wonder whether the
problem is a glitch on the PCI bus (that is being driven hard by the
video card + open source driver), causing the NMI interrupt, and leading
to the "Dazed and confused" video display behavior that follows.  This
could happen more frequently on certain computers and with certain video
cards; small driver changes might fix some computers but not others?
Maybe the ATI driver knows how to back off the bus loading and/or
recover from this problem???

ATI configuration info:
$ lspci -n | grep 0300
01:00.0 0300: 1002:5b60
$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV370 5B60 [Radeon X300 
(PCIE)]

-- Jim


** Attachment added: "lspci output"
   http://launchpadlibrarian.net/11180475/lspci-wnn.log.txt

-- 
X freezes when compiz is enabled on ATI cards
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/108527
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