Bug#807040: general: System hangs and then restarts (kernel panic)
Package: general
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
Starting up the system normally, with X11. The panic often seems to occur when several windows are open or when maximizing a window.
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
Opening more apps and maximizing windows.
* What was the outcome of this action?
Whole system freezes up (cannot move the mouse pointer anymore) and then after a delay of like 5 to 10 seconds, system just restarts. I assume that this must be a kernel panic.
Hardware problems can be ruled out, I run a RAM test, came back clear, I also reformated the harddisk (SSD), with a bad block check, also came back clean.
I have run this Laptop (Lenovo T61) for many many years, every day without problems. Last with Debian 7, which never gave me these kinds of problems. I just upgraded to 8 last week (fresh install) and the problem has been made my work laptop almost unusable.
Kernel Panic always happens, sometimes 5 minutes after using the system, sometimes it takes 10 minutes.
I suspect that it could be the nouveau driver: I used to use the proprietary NVIDIA driver in Debian 7, which was terrible slow. Nouveau is very fast, but seems to crash the kernel.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.2
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Reply to: