Xorg Hard Crash with Radeon

Question

I've experienced several apparently random Xorg crashes which leave my system with apparently no graphics though still running ( I can ssh in ) after upgrading xorg and xf86-vdieo-ati. I don't experience the same crashes on Debian so I'm betting it's not hardware failure.
Upon crashing, the monitor will display 5 or 6 pixels sheared across the screen with my cursor still rendered properly but everything else inaccessible. If I C-A-Backspace then the Xorg process terminates but my monitor no longer detects any video output. I restart remotely and the system is fine for another few hours.
I think the issue is probably with the radeon driver. Does anybody have any insight on what to be causing this or any options I could enable to make it more stable?
Here is the Xorg.0.log error message:
[   644.225] (II) RADEON(0): RADEONRestoreMemMapRegisters() :
[   644.225] (II) RADEON(0):   MC_FB_LOCATION   : 0x00cf00c0 0x00cf00c0
[   644.225] (II) RADEON(0):   MC_AGP_LOCATION  : 0x0003ffff
[   717.608] (EE) RADEON(0): Timeout trying to update memory controller settings !
[   717.608] (EE) RADEON(0): You will probably crash now ...
Relevant packages versions:
ati-dri 7.9.0.git20101207-2
libgl 7.9.0.git20101207-2
xf86-video-ati 6.13.2-2
xorg-server 1.9.2-2
kernel26 2.6.36.2-1
Section in my xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf
Section "Device"
    Identifier "r"
    Driver "radeon"
    Option "AGPMode" "4"
    Option      "DMAForXv" "on"
EndSection
The kernel line in my grub config:
kernel /vmlinuz26 root=/dev/disk/by-uuid/3096e95a-72c1-4952-ae93-42f862ed599f ro radeon.modeset=1
$ lspci | grep VGA
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 760G [Radeon 3000]
Thanks in advance!
Last edited by Tassadar (2011-01-15 14:56:02)

Answer 1

You probably ruled that out already, but with such random errors it is always worth to consider, that they may be due to temperature issues or defective RAM.