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? 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). 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? 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. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature