Kenplaysviola » X high cpu usage http://www.kenplaysviola.com The life of an I.T. guy who tries to play the viola Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:10:41 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Red Hat SIGALRM loop http://www.kenplaysviola.com/?p=164 http://www.kenplaysviola.com/?p=164#comments Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:42:17 +0000 kenplaysviola http://www.kenplaysviola.com/?p=164 I recently upgraded my Dell Precision 690 at work from 2GB of memory to 8GB of memory. After installing the memory, my Red Hat 5 would not boot up the X server and present me with the typical login screen. I noticed that my mouse cursor was moving against a solid black background, and it was moving very slow and choppy. I was able to SSH into the machine from another machine and noticed that the xorg was running about 90% CPU! Doing an strace on the processor ID, I found that there was a SIGALRM loop! It turns out it is exactly this
Red Hat Bug.

There isn’t an official fix for this problem, but what worked for me was to download the most recent ATI drivers and install it. With the new ATI video drivers, all was well again. I figure that the same solution would be true for Nvidia users. I’m not sure why upgrading my system memory from 2GB to 8GB would affect the video performance, but somehow it did.

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