debug system freeze

brian fedora at logi.ca
Fri Sep 4 02:24:21 UTC 2009


On 09/03/2009 10:25 PM, stan wrote:
> On Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:36:39 -0400
> brian<fedora at logi.ca>  wrote:
>
>> Every couple of days, for the past couple of weeks, my computer locks
>> up on me. I can't drop out of X; the only thing to do is hold down
>> the power button to shut it down. Can anyone suggest how to debug
>> this?
>>
>
> My thought is that it would take some serious effort to debug this.
> Recompile the kernel and turn on as many of the debugging options in
> kernel hacking as possible.  Run the modified kernel in a virtual
> machine or separate install and use lots of logging that is short term
> (you don't need logs from hours ago, 5 minutes of logs is probably
> plenty).  When it hangs, boot into another system to examine the logs of
> the frozen system.  The logging might prevent the problem from
> happening, depending on what it is, but you have a chance of catching it
> in the act.
>
> When this was happening to me, I thought it behaved like the IP stack
> was being corrupted.  That means that the system is frozen, because
> there was no next instruction.  Dead, defunct, deceased.  Only post
> mortem examination possible.
>
> I've seen an option in the kernel to allow a second kernel to be built
> and swap in when the first crashes in order to do the post mortem, but
> I'm not sure that would work in this case, and in any case I haven't
> actually used it.
>

Thanks for the input. It's more or less as I thought. I figured I'd at 
least need to re-compile the kernel in order to even hope to catch 
something logged. I thought I'd ask, though.

I think I'm going to downgrade to 10, all the same. 11 has been way too 
big a mess on this box. :-(




More information about the fedora-list mailing list