[ILUG] Computer freezes

[Andrew McGill]

Hi Kevin,

I'll drop in a very late comment:

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:44:44 +0000
kevin <lists at cybercolloids.net> wrote:

> I have a small network where all the clients run Ubuntu Maverick. They
> all run fine apart from one computer that, about once or twice a day,
> just freezes. The mouse still moves around but you can't click on
> anything and the keyboard does not respond.
I have had this very problem on a laptop also running Ubuntu Maverick (32 bit) - a hp ProBook 4530s with 3Gb of RAM - some integrated intel display adapter.  The problem generally occurs when running LibreOffice with a reasonably sized spreadsheet - actually every Wednesday, when I open that spreadsheet.  The mouse continues to work, and the keyboard freezes entirely - not even Alt+SysRq+R works.  

I was able to repeatably produce the problem by loading two 60 page documents with revision marks into LibreOffice, but I stopped when the crash chewed up the original that I was trying to edit.  Judging by the CPU fan behaviour, once or twice the CPU was running at full blast during the crash.  

I can only think that one of the CPU's has locked up while holding some important part of the big kernel lock, and that it is not the one that handles mouse interrupts.  I suspect there is a problem with the build quality of the system, as there has been (just once) a timeout on accessing the disk over the bus.  Of course, it could equally be some problem with the kernel assuming that the hardware is sane.

> Any ideas or should I dump it and install Debian, which is long term
> plan anyway.
I dumped Maverick and went to "O" last week.  New bugs for old, but no crash yet.

&:-)