9.10 and sudden reboots on a Lenovo T60 thinkpad

[J]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 13:23, Bill Moseley <moseley at hank.org> wrote:
>> This is going to probably sound like a silly question, but what
>> happens when Bill does this stuff WITHOUT using Chrome?
>
> That's nagging me, too.  I'll try and stop using Chrome and see if that
> makes a difference.  (Chrome is so much faster than Firefox -- especially
> with Firebug enabled in Firefox that it's hard to go back.)
> Still, Chrome is running in user land and for it to trigger a hard reboot
> w/o the kernel complaining about anything seems unlikely (and, really, a
> kernel problem).

Yeah, I would expect some sort of traceback, dump, or panic, really...
 and honestly, I haven't used Chrome in a while, but I did have lots
of problems with it at least locking the system up after running for
too long.  I know they've made vast improvements on it since the last
time I bothered with it, and my wife, at least, seems to like it on
her XP box...

Another thought, that may not help, and honestly, I don't know if or
how to even configure it in Ubuntu, would be kdump.  That runs in it's
own little space and if/when the kernel crashes, it creates a full
core dump on disk and allows you to reboot the system, so you have
something to examine post mortem.  I know on Red Hat and SuSE it's as
simple to set up as telling the installer you want it on, and how much
memory to give it, but I've never looked at setting it up on anything
else.

It HAS, howerver, proved useful on RH and SuSE at least, a time or
two, in figuring out what was some of my test systems to inexplicably
die.

Another thing you may want to look at, if possible, are the System
Event Logs in BIOS (If your BIOS supports that).  If you do have bad
hardware, or possibly even a bit of software throwing an NMI, that
will cause systems to shutdown and reboot spontaneously.

Also, as has been mentioned before, I believe, heat issues can cause
this as well.  And you may or may not get any warning at the OS level
that there's an over-temp event being thrown.

Cheers,
Jeff