Re: Do not know which package bug is in
On Fri, 01 Apr 2016 11:21:27 +0100
Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-04-01 at 10:25 +0100, Robin Oberg wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > I'm new to Linux and Debian 8.3, but thought I'd help out by sharing
> > this bug that I've found. My system crashes randomly when my iPhone
> > is
> > charging via USB, and every time that it happens I am forced to
> > hard-reboot the laptop by holding down the power button. I don't
> > know where in the system this bug could be located, what package it
> > might be.
> ...
> >
> > Any help would be appreciated.
>
> Intermittent failures like that sound more like hardware problems.
Indeed so, but we have been somewhat conditioned to believe that
catastrophic failure with the CPU(s) either halted or looping
uselessly is inevitably a sign of hardware failure. I would always bet
that way, but sometimes I'd lose.
I once tried producing Bluetooth sound from a Wheezy machine, and
plugging in a dongle killed the dual-core machine stone dead. No
response to network stimuli, no logs even a second past the point of
failure, no error messages at that point, just the expected USB new
connection stuff. I tried a few more times with the same result (don't
quote Einstein at me, he had never seen a modern computer, which is
not determinate on any human scale).
I accept that I must not have had the right software installed to deal
with this dongle, but this was definitely a software-related hard
crash, so it can happen. Mine was instant and utterly repeatable, but it
is even easier for software failure to be intermittent than hardware
failure. Einstein hadn't heard of intermittent faults, either.
I've used the same (motherboard) USB ports for other peripherals,
including charging, though not at iPhone levels, which certainly are
beyond the USB spec. The same dongle has been used to talk to a GPS
device and a CAN bus device while connected to a netbook running sid at
a time roughly contemporary with Wheezy.
--
Joe
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