On Fri, 2025-08-15 at 19:50 -0400, The Wanderer wrote: > On 2025-08-15 at 19:39, Van Snyder wrote: > > > On Sat, 2025-08-16 at 00:33 +0100, alain williams wrote: > > > > > • When the system crashes return to the console and have a look > > > at > > > what top is telling you - check especially Memory and Swap use. > > > > When the system crashes, it is well and truly crashed. The mouse > > cursor doesn't move. The keyboard doesn't do anything. Tapping the > > power button doesn't do anything. The graphs in GKrellM aren't > > moving,... And I can't log in from another computer using ssh. So > > it's hard to return to the console and ask what top is telling me. > > The ssh bit is a good detail to know. Does *ping* still get responses > when the computer is in the frozen state?
No response to ping. > This is looking like one of three things: a hardware issue (which, as > you note, seems less likely given that it's happening on two > different > computers), a drivers issue (most likely GPU drivers, given what > Firefox > would be likely to interact with), or a *firmware* issue (potentially > even CPU microcode). That was my first guess so I replaced my NVidia K2200 with an AMD Radeon RX580. > Unfortunately, I'm not sure of how to usefully probe which one it is. > Some of the potential hardware issues could be potentially confirmed > by > running the type of system diagnostics that have been built-in on > many > motherboards for a good number of years now, or via a memtest-type > tool; > others, however, would not be so easy to pin down. > > Some motherboard firmware (i.e., formerly BIOS, nowadays more likely > UEFI) has an event-log facility itself, and depending on what type of > event is occurring, it might be something that would get recorded in > such a log. Do you know if yours has any such thing? I'm pretty sure the antique Gigabyte I'm using now doesn't have one. After MSI returns my Z790, I'll look for such a thing in the UEFI. > The canonical way to try to get more information would probably to be > to > connect a serial console, have a relevant log (or other data-source > stream) feeding out over it as info comes in to that source, and see > what happens - or, at minimum, what *has just* happened - in that > data > stream when the freeze event occurs. There are *multiple* parts of > that > which are easier said than done, however, and I would barely know > where > to get started trying to find out how to actually do it. Not having any serial ports, I could put a log onto a USB disk. Is there a way to ask for flushing after every write so the interesting stuff doesn't die a pointless death in the OS's disk cache?
