Best way to debug an Intel Core i5 hang - likely graphics (possibly power) related

[Graeme Russ]

This may not be the best place to post this question, so please excuse...

I have a brand new Intel i5 / z68 EUFI motherboard (ASRock Z68 Pro3
Gen3) with 8GB RAM running Fedora 16 (64 bit) which is experiencing
lockups which send the video crazy (flashing screen) but there is
nothing appearing in /var/log/messages to indicate what is going wrong
(no oops).

I'm sure it is graphics related. I thought of Cc'ing the i915
maintainer (Keith Packard) but figured I should wait until I am sure

I _think_ it might be power related as the hang never seems to occur
while I'm actively using the computer - Only after I have stopped for
a few minutes does it happen but not always.

I have had it run overnight without a problem, I've had times when it
has slept several times before hanging, and times when it has hung the
very first sleep after reboot

I have pulled the latest mainline vanilla kernel (from about two days
ago) and have it configured, build and installed it so I am in a
position to do whatever hacking is required to isolate the issue

So where should I begin?

I have already posted a bug report in Bugzilla
(https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42597), but I want to
isolate the problem to improve the report.

I'm somewhat familiar with kernel hacking, git, diffs etc, so I'm not
at all afraid of some pretty intensive hacking. I have a second PC and
Null-Modem cable (plus Ethernet of course) if that helps, although I
am not familiar with using tools like GDB so anything requiring
on-line debugging will need a bit of explaining

Regards,

Graeme