Linguofreak
Well-known member
I have a ~3 year old homebuilt desktop, running Ubuntu 16.04. I had previously been running 14.04. For the past few months (starting before the upgrade) I've been experiencing random freezes when the machine is left idle for a few days (I keep it running constantly). It never seems to happen when I am actually using the machine (though given the relative infrequency of the freezes, that may be purely statistical). I am quite consistently getting *only* freezes (never any kernel panics), and there is never anything in the logs that indicates any trouble (or even any consistent chain of events) leading up to a freeze: There's just a bunch of business as usual log messages, and then from a certain time the log messages stop. I had been suspecting the freezes might have something to do with the monitor being put into powersave mode (some sort of graphics driver bug, perhaps), but after setting Xscreensaver to never put the monitor to sleep, I awoke this morning to find the machine frozen in the middle of a screensaver.
I'm now trying booting without the custom kernel that I normally use, and hoping that I'm hitting a kernel bug that isn't in the stock Ubuntu kernel.
The freeze does not appear to be anything CPU or GPU related. I've exercised both fairly well while using the machine without trouble, the screensaver the machine froze in this morning is not a computationally intensive one, and the freeze this morning is the first one not to have occurred while the monitor was in powersave mode (meaning no intensive screensavers or interactive programs). The freeze also does not appear to be RAM related. (I'd expect RAM issues to be more varied: a kernel panic here, an application crash there, and a freeze thrown in every once in a while). It does not seem to be HDD related (I've seen failed HDDs result in lockups before, but the machine doesn't tend to boot afterward, and if it does there tends to be tons of log spam about disk errors).
Once again, I'm hoping this relates to my custom kernel somehow and is entirely a software issue. If it is not, is there any item of hardware that people would tend to suspect?
I'm now trying booting without the custom kernel that I normally use, and hoping that I'm hitting a kernel bug that isn't in the stock Ubuntu kernel.
The freeze does not appear to be anything CPU or GPU related. I've exercised both fairly well while using the machine without trouble, the screensaver the machine froze in this morning is not a computationally intensive one, and the freeze this morning is the first one not to have occurred while the monitor was in powersave mode (meaning no intensive screensavers or interactive programs). The freeze also does not appear to be RAM related. (I'd expect RAM issues to be more varied: a kernel panic here, an application crash there, and a freeze thrown in every once in a while). It does not seem to be HDD related (I've seen failed HDDs result in lockups before, but the machine doesn't tend to boot afterward, and if it does there tends to be tons of log spam about disk errors).
Once again, I'm hoping this relates to my custom kernel somehow and is entirely a software issue. If it is not, is there any item of hardware that people would tend to suspect?