HOWTO: Overcome X.org system lock-up many users are experiencing

[simianMiscreant]

You may or may not be one of hundreds of Linux users spanning multiple distros, video cards, and video drivers experiencing the nefarious system lock-up apparently caused by a driver-level problem (perhaps even kernel-level) with X.org. On my particular system, the system hard-locks and stops responding to ping, and I have to power off/on. Usually some sort of icon dragging, column resizing, or Firefox scrolling (all things that use acceleration) precipitates the crash. Some users report mouse movement, and some are even able to SSH back in to their machines. Those latter few have brought back the knowledge that the problem is caused by X.org - a "top" shows X.org eating 99.5% of CPU. I have found a way around this, but it isn't pretty - expect to disable all acceleration on your card (including 2-D) meaning no video playback, a laggy GUI, and zero 3-D of any sort. I've tried this using "radeon" and "fglrx," and since I don't have an nVidia card, I'd appreciate if an nVidia user could fiddle around and bring back results. For ATI users, here are the commands I used to negotiate the crash (I'm going to also include what options I'm using positively [not disabling], as these might or might not have anything to do with the fix):

Section "Module"
	Load	"bitmap"
	Load	"dbe"
	Load	"ddc"
#	Load	"dri"
	Load	"extmod"
	Load	"freetype"
	Load	"glx"
	Load	"int10"
	Load	"record"
	Load	"type1"
	Load	"vbe"
  	Load 	"GLcore"
        # Load "extmod" but omit DGA extension
  SubSection "extmod"
    Option "omit xfree86-dga"
  EndSubSection

In the Module section, comment out DRI support.

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility 9800 (M18 JN)"
	Driver "radeon"

	Option "NoAccel" "true"
	Option "DDCMode" "true"
	Option "DisplayPriority" "BIOS"
	Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS, TMDS"
	Option "RenderAccel" "false"
	Option "MergedFB" "off"

Your Device section should include these options - disabling acceleration, accelerated rendering, and a merged framebuffer.

I hope that fixes people up - it's a huge deal right now across many distros. I know for a fact users of Fedora Core 3 and Gentoo are experiencing this crash. Now we sit tight for an X.org update to fix this and give us back our hardware acceleration.