All,
I am running 6.2.15 Boinc as a daemon under Fedora on a 8 core 64 bit machine. All seems to work okay except for one very annoying thing. Occasionally, the keyboard stops working. Seems to happen at random every couple of hours. Mostly the keyboard input is simply ignored, though occasionally it gets stuck sending the same key. There is nothing physically wrong with the keyboard itself. This problem does not occur if Boinc is not running, and usually goes away if Boinc is killed.

Anybody have any ideas how to avoid this problem?

-August

The problem occurs when the client is running. I tried configuring it to run always so it would not need to observe the keyboard and mouse, but the problem remains.

I have a USB keyboard.

I could try updating to the latest version, which would also allow me to take advantage of Cuda. I am currently using the version from the Fedora distribution.

Okay, I have updated to v6.4.5. I'll let you know how it works out. Thanks for your help.

-August

I hope you're not going for CUDA on Seti as the only operating system that they have an application for is Windows. All the others will get support in the future.

As for hanging of keyboard... I had that happen to me once, it was a constant overflow in the keyboard buffer that would do that. In the end it was caused by a broken motherboard.

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Switching to v6.4.5 did not help.

Jord, you say your problem was eventually traced to the motherboard. How were you able to identify the motherboard as the problem?

-August

For me the problem started with the keyboard buffer overflows, increasing the keyboard buffer would only slightly increase the time between hangs. Eventually I also started getting blue screens of death that I couldn't attribute to anything.

I had changed the keyboard already, from PS/2 to USB even and still had the problem. Which then points to it being out of my control and it being the motherboard.

Replacing the motherboard, the problem went away.

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I'm running 6.4.5 on Gentoo AMD64, kernel 2.6.27. I have the same keyboard problem, and I don't think it's motherboard-related, because the problem only started when I switched from Ubuntu x86 to Gentoo. I'm running three different BOINC projects, and it seems that at any given time, it's only one of them that's the cause of the keyboard freeze (though it could be any of the three), as suspending the right project will free up the keyboard. Immediately resuming the offending project doesn't cause the problem to immediately recur.

Other notes: The keyboard completely freezes (even the LEDs won't toggle) except for the Magic SysRq Key, which works even when the keyboard problem manages to completely freeze the system (mouse too). I had 6.2.15 on Gentoo prior to 6.4.5; that version had the same problem. When the keyboard freezes, if I wait long enough, it will start working again on its own.

It seems like the problem is more likely to occur when I'm doing a lot a once. It seems especially likely to happen when I'm using Mumble (a VoIP program), which leads me to suspend BOINC before I do voice chat. Nothing untoward is in /var/log/boinc.log, nor in the kernel log.

My computer isn't the latest and greatest by any means, but it's not yet obsolete, either. Athlon 64 X2 4400+, the Toledo core, with 2 GiB of RAM.

The only reason I'm on Gentoo, really, is because I got a bit sick of all Ubuntu, all the time--I have Ubuntu on my laptop and the work computer, and I've stuck with it for four years. It was just time for a change, and I'm trying to get all the bugs worked out of my Gentoo installation now.

Seems odd that people would be having trouble with Debian but not Ubuntu--Ubuntu is Debian-based, however distant that connection may be these days. But I don't think giving up on Gentoo just for BOINC is the answer--I'd probably sooner give up on BOINC, but as it is I can live with the random keyboard freezes. I'd just rather not have them at all.

Update:

It appears that an update to the 2.6.28 kernel fixed the problem. No idea why or how.