Hey there I am doing yet another edit with newly gathered information. So far there has been few responses here, so this will probably be the last one.
I am running a ThinkPad P14s with Ubuntu 20.04. Some times the machine freezes completely and I have to hard reset it.
I am almost sure this does not happen because I am running out of RAM or the machine getting to hot.
Of course I want to track the root of the problem, but I also want to learn more about how to approach these problems in general as I have little knowledge of Ubuntu and Linux in general.
So what log file and setting should I look at?
What am I looking for?
Maybe there are also guides that you could link me to. Although I get overwhelmed by those quite fast. A similar question has been asked here (Tracking down a random freeze?) and /var/log/syslog is mentioned there but the question of what to look for was not answered.
I have gathered some additional information that hopefully can enable some one to help me.
Occurrences and graphics card
I am not 100% certain but I think the freezes occur exclusively when
- watching a DvD / Blueray
- streaming videos
- during games
I changed what graphics card is used with prime-select [nvidia | intel]. But the freezes occur in both setups.
no REISUB
When a freeze occurs I cannot reboot the system with SysRq + R E I S U B.
From what I understand that is not the case for "most" system crashes.
Does that lead towards some possible problems more that towards others?
memtest
I tried to to do the steps here but holding Shift did not open GRUB. After some searching I found that I can change /etc/default/grub such that I have:
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
Now GRUB opens on every reboot, but there is no option memtest86+ available. I checked that /etc/grub.d/ contains the executable file 20_memtest86+ and I also checked all options under "advanced" in GRUB.
What else could I try in order to run memtest?
psensor
I do not think my problem comes from overheating. The last couple of freezes happened when my Laptop felt relatively cool. I use "psensor" to constantly track the temperature.
problems on reboot
This may or may not be related. I recently was trying to load a save game of some game but the game crashed every time. I decided to reboot the system to see if that helps but the reboot could not be completed! Instead the following was printed:
Virtual device wlp0s20f3 asks to queue paket!
sytemmd-shutdown[1]: Could not detach Dm /dev/dm-0: Device or resource busy
sytemmd-shutdown[1]: Failed to finalize DM devices, ignoring
sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: error: no reply expected, received 0x0
xhci_hcd 0000:2b:00.0: Host halt failed, -19
I had to hard reset after this. What does that mean?
0 Answers