Hello list, recently my netbook got the habit of freezing sporadically. It happens apparently out of the blue. Until now I thought it might have something to do with audio playback, because I remember always having music playing when it happens. But just now it happened without music:
One second I was surfing along, the other second -- dead. While I was already 3 hours in of a 4-hour emerge. :-( If music is playing at a freeze, the last bit of it (less than a second's worth) is looped indefinitely. The screen output is still there, but there is no reaction to any input, not even sysrequests. I also tried SSHing in without success. I have no experience with Kernel debugging. Is there any possibility at all of finding out what the problem is? Perhaps enable some log output? Being a netbook, there is no serial port (which I don't have the means to connect to anyway). In the hopes that the problem started with a 3.9 kernel, I am building a 3.8.13 again (using kernel.org archives). I ran a memtest a few months back and stopped it after 8 successful passes. I might try that again as soon as I find out how¹, but I'd think that a corrupt memory would cause something different than a full freeze. I'm running a 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland with march=atom. I'd really hate to find out the machine has a hardware problem, it's a very neat piece of silicon with a great screen. Who cares that the 6.5 Watt CPU is a tad slow. It's perfect for a console environment. :-) ¹ I have the in-kernel memtest enabled, so I tried booting it with the "memtest" option right after the last freeze happened. But all I got was a black screen with blinking cursor. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’ Please do not share anything from, with or about me with any Facebook service. The circle is the parallel to the dot.
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