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.