Kernel freeze next steps

[Ed Arnold]

"Timothy M. Spear" <tspear at tangiblesoftware.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>    My desktop machine will periodically freeze completely. It will not 
>respond to mouse, keyboard, network pings, ssh or any other service. I 
>have tried the usual items to eliminate the problem:
>    1. memtest 86+ no errors
>    2. turn off ACPI, APM, and AMD PowerNow
>    3. checked messages, syslog, kern.log, dmesg for errors. I did not 
>find any.
>    4. Leave the machine in console mode and wait for a lock. No errors 
>displayed.
>    5. Rebuild system in case of corruption
>    6. Check system freeze with Live CD. Does not (which leads me to 
>suspect disk I/O is the problem).
>    7. Check hardware in other machines, tested everything but CPUs and 
>Motherboards in other computers. No problems.
>    8. BIOS Patches. All updated.
>
>    One other symptom, which may or may not be related, is very slow I/O 
>performance.
>
>    Basic system information:
>    -- Gutsy Gibbon AMD64, fully patched.
>    -- Dual Opteron 246 processors
>    -- 4 GB of Ram
>    -- 8 SATA Drives. 4 attached on the Motherboard, 4 attached to a 
>Promise card. Both use the SiI 3114 Chipset.
>
>    Any ideas on what next to try to debug this would be appreciated.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Tim
>
>-- 
>Timothy M. Spear
>COO
>Tangible Software, Inc.


Chances are you've got a configuration that tickles this bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/159398

I have a Dell D810 laptop that does the same thing.  Once the system
locks up, it won't respond to anything, including CTL+ALT+F1.  So there
isn't much you can do.

My "fix" for this was to install 7.04.  So far 7.04 has not locked,
but I'll have to run it a while longer before I'm sure it's OK.