Thanks to Adam, who reminded me that I’d never posted the followup to my X Windows woes on the Crusoe-equipped P2110. There was a two part fix…

Part one, which probably applies to everyone running a .deb-based distro, is to recompile the X packages with different optimizations. The problem and actual workaround is well documented by this fellow, and he culminates his page in a patch and some documentation on the issue. This will fix anyone’s issue on standard X11 .deb packages. Also keep in mind that the debian/ubuntu xorg packages suffer from the same issue (I tried them), so you’d have to build the .debs yourself with -O0 optimization. This fix took care of the “app randomly dying from time to time, slowly taking X with it” problem.

Part 2 of my fix was solely due to my stupidity. I wanted the tvout and X acceleration from the retinalburn drivers, so I’d installed those. Those, of course, were compiled with -O2 optimization. They also stuck thru .deb removals as I’d put them in outside of the .deb process, and that’s what caused my X to just up and say “fuck it” and die, without writing anything to the logs.

At any rate; I’ve had a couple of months of trouble-free service (finally!), so I’m going to call this done. Yay!