fixed debian unstable udev causes x windows crash

I've had a problem with my laptop since December last year. My laptop is a Debian unstable system and Whenever I would update the udev package to anything post 0.70 I would get a hard crash in X.org once it was started. I had to downgrade the udev package and reinstall the hotplug package it replaced in order to avoid the crashes. It's important to keep udev up to date because it handles loading drivers of hardware and responding to new hardware like usb devices when they are inserted when the computer is running.

I figured that this might be a temporary problem with Debian Unstable, as happens occaisionally, because at the time there were a number of large upgrades added and I thought one of these might have caused the problem. I wrote to Marco d'Itri the maintainer of the udev package to ask him if he could help me and his reply came back just 1 hour later.

udev cannot cause your kernel to just crash. I suggest you compare the lists of drivers loaded, and if this still does not help try getting the error messages with netconsole or even better a serial console.

-- ciao, Marco

So no clues there, I had already tried reading error messages and there was nothing but because my laptop has no serial port it is not possible to use serial console as far as I know. I compared the drivers loaded with each version of udev with lsmod but the same drivers were loaded in each case.

Anyway, as you can see from the title of this post I think I've fixed my problem, it turns out it wasn't udev's fault at all. I found some strange error messages in my X.org log file recently after updating to x.org R7.0, all involving drm, which is for accelerated 3d graphics as far as I can see. So I decided to try removing the DRI drivers from the xorg.conf file since they didn't seem to be working and lo and behold not only did the error messages disappear but the crashing with the new udev packages stopped too! Yay!

I will try and work on the DRI driver see if I can get a bug report about it but in the mean time I am happy now that I have finally got udev installed.

I'm posting this here in case anybody else has the problem.

Technorati Tags: Debian, Debian Unstable, udev, X.org, crash