Ask Slashdot: Unexpected X-Windows Crashes?

Michael Wood writes in with a problem I myself have experienced from time to time. Here's it is: I've recently installed RedHat 5.1 on a pentium ii w/ 64 MB ram, S3 Virge/GX AGP video card, and SB AWE 64. X (or Linux or something) seems to be very unstable. If I start X, open an xterm and type "ls -lR /" (or various other commands) as a normal user the machine hangs solid after a small amount of output. I've done this a few times while trying to figure out what's going on, while running "while sync; do sleep 1; done" from a virtual console. While the while loop is running, the hard drive makes a noise every second as expected. When the machine hangs the hard drive is completely quiet, so it's not just X that's hung. Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing. Keyboard leds do nothing. Can you help him out? Hit the link for more...

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I've had no problems with the machine in text mode, although I haven't run any resource hungry, text mode programs.

The Xwrapper is suid root, but the X server isn't, right? So if the Xwrapper drops privs (which is it's whole purpose) the X server gets run with access to the console, but no other privs, right? So if the X server only has access to the console, can it cause the machine to hang? And if it can, SHOULD it be able to? This sounds like a kernel bug to me, but I don't know enough about such things :)

I've tried out Linux-2.1.121. It died after a few lines of output from 'ls -lR /' in an xterm.

I got hold of Metro-X from RedHat 4.1. This seems to be more stable. I managed to go all the way through an 'ls -lR /' It did hang once, though. Also, it doesn't support my video card, so I could only get 640x480x4bpp working. I was going to try the frame buffer thing and the frame buffer X server, but the only frame buffer X server I have found so far is one for 680x0. I'll probably give GGI and XGGI a try next, unless I can find an x86 frame buffer X server.

This is getting kind of long, but Michael and I have been back and forth on this one for a while, and I can't seem to figure it out. As an aside, I've had X crash badly on me 6 times in the past 2 years under suspicious (unexpected) circumstances, and it would be interesting to know if other people have experienced something similar.