kernel crash on Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.66GHz 4-cpus machine

[Ben Collins]

On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 16:05 +0200, Andrea Puglisi wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've installed ubuntu breezybadger and upgraded up to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS a 
> couple of days ago, on my machine with 4 Intel Xeon cpus (2.66Ghz); just 
> yesterday I've upgraded the kernel (which was originally -386) to 
> 2.6.15-26-686 in order to exploit the multiprocessor architecture
> 
> everything was working very well; SO well that I finally launched the 
> execution of four numerical simulations (scientific work)
> 
> a couple of hours ago I was working on the machine (while the four jobs 
> were running smoothly since 20 hours) when it suddenly froze up completely
> 
> screen frozen, keyboard frozen, mouse pointer frozen, alternate screens 
> inaccessible, network interface frozen (no ping from remote): death of the 
> system

It's quite possible that running the CPU's so hard could trigger some
sort of hardware failure. This could include CPU overheating, or memory
corruption.

I wont rule out that it is a kernel problem. I have a xeon system as
well, but I'm running the 64-bit Ubuntu on it. Perhaps you want to run
this as well.

When it froze, were you in X or on the console? If you were in X, this
could explain why you didn't see any messages. Attempting to reproduce
the freeze while at the console would be advisable.

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