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I have a Minisforum mini PC that I installed Ubuntu 24 LTS desktop (default Gnome environment), and the machine randomly reboots ungracefully. If I'm using the machine, it usually resets within an hour, but if I leave it, given a couple hours, it will reboot on its own. I've checked the journal log via journalctl -b -1 after a crash, and see nothing of any value recorded. In fact, if the machine was not in use when it crashed, there may not be log entries for tens of minutes, or even over an hour. I checked /var/log/syslog and /var/log/kern.log, but the same issue - nothing of value and nothing near the time of the crash in either. If I run last after a crash, I can see my last two reboot entires are listed as still running, but my previous tty2 and login screen entries are listed as crash.

  1. I've tried a boot USB with memtest86+, and after multiple full passes, no memory errors have been found.
  2. I've tried stressing the system with s-tui to see if there is a thermal issue, and the machine sits between 88.5 and 89.5 Celcius, and sits there for many minutes, but never crashes, so I don't think there's a CPU or thermal issue.
  3. I've run System Profiler and Hardware Probe to try to find any major driver issues or other problems, and the only thing that's come back is that the USB4 driver doesn't work yet. I'm planning to switch from my USB4 to DisplayPort cable to HDMI-HDMI instead for display to see if that fixes it, but I'd rather not do that long term as my HDMI monitor input seems to only support 30hz 4k, not 60hz 4k.
  4. I've tried installing a clean build of Fedora 40 to see if there's anything in Ubuntu that may be the culprit, but that system crashes randomly in the same manner. I'm back on Ubuntu 24 LTS. I suppose there could be something in Gnome 3, since both OSes use that, but I find that pretty unlikely.
  5. I've checked and my machine BIOS is up-to-date with the latest firmware (which is about 9 months old, so not new/experimental). I did see that Secure Boot was enabled, and so I'll try disabling that, but given the machine boots in general, I doubt that's the cause.

FWIW, Windows was working fine before I blew it away to install/use Linux. Any other thoughts? I'll update the thread when I find out if the crashes stop after switching to HDMI and disabling secure boot, but if there are any other logs that may actually show something, please let me know - I'm at my wit's end. Thank you!

Chris Moyer
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1 Answers1

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After some testing and letting the machine sit, it seems disabling Secure Boot in the BIOS solved my issue. I'm not sure why Secure Boot would cause random untrapped reboots, but here I am, about 20 hours in after switching this and rebooting, with no unexpected reboots. I never went 2-3 hours without an unexpected reboot before. Hope this helps someone else, as well!

Chris Moyer
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