Computer crashes when watching video (suspected due to ACPI)

[henrik]

Hi

When I watch a movie (tested VLC and Xine) the computer freezes randomly, not always and about 10 minutes after started watching (sometimes longer). I can still hear the sound from the movie but the screen (both screens) are frozen and neither the mouse nor the keyboard works (I tried CTRL+ALT+F1 as stated on ACPI homepage but no luck), I have to reboot the computer with the reset button. I was in #kubuntu on freenode and asked about this problem I got the answer that it might be due to ACPI (or due the player i was using but i tested xine after that with the same result) so I did a search on google no how to turn off ACPI. One site sad that i should add "acpi=off noacpi" to the bootloader kernel paramter, so I did and got a huge Kernel panic error. Apparently the kernel didn't appreciate my efforts. I checked my BIOS to see if ACPI are enabled here is what i got:
ACPI 2.0 support - NO
ACPI APIC support - Enabled
APM - Enabled

How can I determine if this really is a ACPI problem and if so how can i fix it ?

[henrik]

Re: Computer crashes when watching video (suspected due to ACPI)

I have some additional information about my problem.

I tried reproduce a crash by starting 5 movies at the same time and load the computer as much as possible, but no luck. The day after the stress test it crashed again this time during minimal load. I used another computer to SSH into my computer when it was frozen, I ran "top" to check if there was any process that took 100% CPU time but no. I noticed that i was till able to pause and start the movie by pressing space so i started the movie and then Xorg went up to 99.9%. I killed Xorg from the other computer that was connected with ssh this caused X to restarted and I could login on my computer again. When i logged in a very odd thing had happen, all my NTFS mounted devices had been unmounted, I could remount them again though.

Does anyone have the slightest idea of what can cause this problem ? I can't rely on another computer all the time.

[askrieger]

Re: Computer crashes when watching video (suspected due to ACPI)

Frankly, I have no idea whether this will help your video viewing problem or not, but the appropriate command to disable ACPI is "acpi=off" (no " marks).

I'm not sure what happens when you add "noacpi". The kernel should just ignore it as an invalid command I think the advice you got was actually to include the command "noapic". I don't know whether that has any relevance to your problem or not.

I would suggest trying both of the commands "acpi=off" and "noapic", one at a time and seeing whether either of them (a) causes a kernel panic, or (b) solves your problem.