Bug#441699: freezes system

[Tomas Pospisek]

On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, Jordà Polo wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 10:47:49PM +0200, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
>> I start neverputt and start hearing one tone after the other (about 3
>> per second) meanwhile my system practically crawls to a freeze (866MHz
>> with 1G RAM, nv X driver). Not much else is happening. It takes about 2
>> minutes to kill the app afterwards.
>> *t
>
> A new stable version of Neverball (1.5.0) was released in February and
> has been available in Debian for a while. Since it includes many
> changes, it would be interesting to know if you can still reproduce this
> problem using the latest release.

I have given away the PC the problem was reported on and now own a 
different one with completely different HW:

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     T7500  @ 2.20GHz
Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller
1G RAM

I guess the new Laptop is about 4 times as fast es the previous one.

And it's running Ubuntu Hardy.

However as soon as I start neverputt CPU goes to 100% and I mean it: the 
Laptop gets hot fast and starts faning like mad. Even when there's 
_nothing_ happening on the screen except the backgound music playing.

The game itself is quite painful to play i.e. really slow. Separate frames 
get rendered at irregular intervals in time.

So now we've got two very distinct HW platforms, and also two more or less 
distinct SW platforms (Ubuntu/Debian) but neverputt is still consuming 
100% CPU while nothing visible is happening. The only common thing is, 
that both systems did not have 3D accelleration.

There's some really groce bug somewhere. I maintain, that someone is 
polling[1] in a very dumb loop somewhere.
*t

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polling_(computer_science)