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I have a Lenovo ThinkPad 11e (with the Intel chipset not the AMD), that used to experience freezes randomly under 14.04 which have persisted after a clean install of 16.04.

Description of the freezes that occur:

  • Screen freezes in place with no distortion
  • Hardware buttons become unresponsive (lights in the mute sound/mic keys no longer toggle when pressed)
  • A hard restart is the only way to fix the freeze
  • There is absolutely no warning before a freeze occurs, the system acts normally right up until it locks up

The issue seems to appear more frequently when I run anything related to Chrome/Chromium on my system (including stuff that uses the Electron framework, e.g. the Atom editor). But it will still occur even if nothing related to those is running. It also doesn't seem to be related to stress on the system because I can run Windows 10 in VMWare Workstation 12 without any issue.

I'm not even sure where I should begin looking in for clues as to what's causing the issue, so I was hoping someone here might have an idea. When the issue occurs the entire computer becomes unresponsive and I have to hard shut down. I'm not sure what logs would have any information related to a hard system freeze.

I have tried using linux-crashdump as suggested by Chris J Arges, but even after replicating my problem twice I have found no crash entries in /var/crash other than those from forcing a kernel crash to make sure it was working

Possibly relevant information:

  • The integrated Intel graphics show up as Intel Bay Trail (which I know has had some problems with Linux in the past)
  • I have upgraded the system to 8 GB of RAM (the issue occurred before this change as well)
  • My system has an SSD formatted to ext4 (the issue occurred using btrfs as well)
  • I have run multiple hardware diagnostic tests (both built-in BIOS tests and from bootable utilities), that have found no issues with my hardware
Community
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Ian
  • 685

5 Answers5

6

Try installing newer kernels. In some cases, it fixes the problem of freezing that caused by bad high precision timer code. This is binary for Linux 4.5.2:

http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.5.2-wily/

Download appropriate 3 .deb binary packages, install them, and reboot to the new kernel. I hope this will fix your problm. By the way, Ubuntu 16.04 is alraedy out with a new kernel, so do a clean install (not an upgrade) and see if it fixes your problem.

Ho1
  • 4,000
5

See https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051

The following eliminated the problem for me.

Edit /etc/default/grub. Change the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="intel_idle.max_cstate=1 quiet splash"

then do

sudo update-grub

and reboot.

Steve
  • 51
2

There isn't enough information to diagnose this so you should file a bug. I'm assuming when you mention 'freeze' the computer needs to be completely power cycled to use it again. With that it is most likely a kernel issue. The following link explains how to file a bug against the Ubuntu kernel: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Bugs

Another approach is to use linux-crashdump to try and capture the failure when it happens. Instructions are here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/CrashdumpRecipe

Finally you could try installing the latest mainline kernel to see if this fixes the issue. This would be useful information to report in the bug as well: http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/daily/current/

Chris
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  • 4
  • 9
1

In your possible relevant issues, you mentioned:

The integrated Intel graphics show up as Intel Bay Trail (which I know has had some problems with Linux in the past)

Here's my personal experience. I have had a similar issue. It was an NVidia GT820M Card. I always had issue using the proprietary drivers from Nvidia

enter image description here

What fixed it for me was using Nouveau Xorg drivers instead. I would switch between them to confirm that was the culprit. The same symptoms as yours would happen. PC will stop responding in the middle of anything anytime without any warning whatsoever. And Chrome browser or Sublime would trigger the freeze easily too.

If you happen to be using a proprietary VGA driver for your PC, switch to an open source version, preferably the nouveau.

And this my experience happened on an Ubuntu i7 15.04. The issue is long gone, and I am free now, but from all you describe I'm happy to put 20 points bounty on the VGA drivers as the culprit

KhoPhi
  • 1,888
0

I was experiencing the same problem on an ASUS N56JN (also Intel chipset). This worked for me:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/debian-ubuntu-building-installing-a-custom-linux-kernel/

It basically explains how update the kernel to the latest version, goes step by step on how to download, compile and install the latest version of the Linux kernel (4.5).

CMorales
  • 171