Bug#807040: general: System hangs and then restarts (kernel panic)

[Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 05:09:30AM -0800, Nigra Truo wrote:
>    * 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.

You can learn more about the cause by giving the system some means of
sending console output elsewhere, such as a serial link.

> 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.

Same happens on my home desktop.  The proprietary driver works fine, nouveau
causes crashes -- a hang then several seconds later (sometimes immediately)
a reboot.

I've reported it on the nouveau bugzilla:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=79518
so if you obtain console logs you can check if it's the same issue.
Alas, my bug report got no response.

One thing to check would be whether new kernels solve the crashes -- the
nouveau driver got large changes in 4.3.  Your kernel is 3.16, mine when I
last looked at the issue was 3.14.


-- 
A tit a day keeps the vet away.