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Re: Debugging mysterious freeze / crash



On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 10:51:27PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> 
> I've been experiencing a great deal of frustration recently with
> intermittent freezes / crashes on my Debian Sid system (a Lenovo
> W550s). The symptoms are that the screen totally freezes and the system
> becomes completely unresponsive (even ssh attempts from another machine
> fail), and the only thing that seems to have any effect is a hard
> reboot (holding down the power button until the system restarts).
> 
> Upon reboot, I can't find anything at all interesting in 'journalctl -b
> -1', or /var/log/syslog - the former just shows everything looking
> normal until the moment of the crash, at which point the log just ends,
> and the latter also just shows everything seeming to be fine until the
> moment of the crash, and then shows the boot messages from the reboot.
> 
> Any ideas of what could be causing this, or how I could go about
> debugging it? I've been using this machine for years without
> experiencing anything like this, and I'm not sure for how long this has
> been a problem. I did recently upgrade from stable to unstable, but I'm
> not sure whether or not the problem's initial occurences coincide with
> the upgrade.


How long have you waited before you reboot?  I occasionally (pretty 
rarely, thankfully) get freezes on my Lenovo T400 running Debian 9
Stretch (stable) and I used to think I would have to hard reboot it 
like you do, but I noticed that they actually get fixed if I wait up to 
a few minutes.  Never timed them but the longest probably lasted more 
than five minutes.  Usually they're less than a minute.  

When these freezes happen, it seems it is relatively soon after starting 
to use the laptop after it's been suspended overnight or so.  They're 
rare, though.  I didn't try ssh'ing at the time but everything is 
completely frozen.  And finally, these freezes didn't use to happen a 
year ago or earlier but it's been at least a few months that this has 
been going on.

Your machine and Debian version seem much newer but I thought I'd share 
my experience.


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