Arch Linux

weeboo1

Member

Registered: 2008-12-02

Posts: 2

Complete lock-up using 64bit -> 32bit env. to run games in wine

I've been having this problem for several weeks now; I'm using 64-bit arch linux 2.6.33, everything up-to-date. I have been using chroot and a 32-bit environment (setup following this: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … in_Arch64) in order to run several games under wine (All valve w/ steam and Starcraft/Starcraft II beta). Now everything has been working pretty great, games run smoothly and look nice, I have a Nvidia 9800GTX and it has been handling everything very well (i.e. Halflife Ep. 2 runs smoothly at "very high" texture detail).

The only problem is, every once and a while the computer will 100% lock-up. Screen freeze, no keyboard/mouse, I even tried to ssh into the computer from my laptop (something that I do regularly, so I have sshd running) and it returns "No route to host" even though the network card is still blinking there is no TCP/IP stack. It is like the kernel just froze over and I'm forced to hit the restart button (I hate that button).

There aren't any errors thrown or logs to trace afterwards either, it's as if it was running completely fine one second and had the power cut the next.

More recently I came across a tweak to the wine registry that let you specify the exact amount of video memory your card has (512MB). After adding this key I found performance to be vastly improved, for example Halflife ep. 2 would freeze up within 1-2 minutes of starting game play and now I haven't experienced a freeze with it yet. Me thinking the problem was fixed (:D) and it must have been do to the video memory difference started to try out several games with success until after running the SC2 beta for longer than a hour or so I experienced the freeze again (:o).

This has made me think maybe it was something to do with the graphics and something overflowing after an extended period of running a game, but I'm really stumped here.

Thank you for any comments or help.

weeboo1

Member

Registered: 2008-12-02

Posts: 2

Re: Complete lock-up using 64bit -> 32bit env. to run games in wine

Okay, update.

After disabling the "Override Application Setting" option for both Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering in the 32bit environment, I have not experienced another lockup (yet). Since I have no idea what is triggering them, I can only guess but after some additional reading I'm thinking it might have something to do with cache aliasing filling up the memory but most reports on that suggest that the current kernel has no such issues, so it's a shot in the dark.