# Intermittent freeze / hang / lock-up ????

## syrex314

I'm wondering if anyone has general troubleshooting tips for system freeezes.

My gentoo box at home works fine as long as I'm sitting in front of it. But leave it alone for a few hours, and it becomes completely unresponsive-- no response to kebyoard, can't ssh in, and not even alt-sysrq-b will get it to reboot.

/var/log/messages reports nothing interesting, except the last cron job that ran before the things freeze.

I just replaced the power supply, mother board and CPU, because it was crashing frequently with PCI-related errors and complete garbage dumped to /var/log/messages.

I'm very frustrated that the current problems leave no trace in the logs, and never seem to happen when I'm using the computer.   :Mad: 

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## Jaglover

Must be something to do with power management then. Hope you have APM disabled, is acpid running? Do you use screensaver? Some ideas how to set up stuff: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml

Any boot errors in dmesg? Is latest BIOS flashed in?

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## syrex314

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll post back what I find out.

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## chris...

after my cat pushed my laptop off the table i have a similar problem

would work fine non-stop while i used it

I fixed it by disabling all power management in the kernel and bios and disabling tsc

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## propofool

memtest . prime95 stress test,  read in the overclocking forums what the tards do to test their boxes

obviouosly if you replace  cpu power board its gonna end up being the ram

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## Jaglover

 *propofool wrote:*   

> memtest . prime95 stress test,  read in the overclocking forums what the tards do to test their boxes
> 
> obviouosly if you replace  cpu power board its gonna end up being the ram

 

What is prime95? The only similar thing Google found for me is Prime95 but it requires Microsoft Windows. Can you provide a link, please?

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## syrex314

Installed acpid, continued having the problem. Then one day I tried keeping an ssh with xclock running from my computer at work. It kept running the whole day, no problems. That night it froze up. The next day, I stopped xdm, and kept top running in a virtual console. No freeze. The next day, I started up xdm again, and did not leave top running anywhere. No freeze. 

Now it's been up for 2 days and 10 hours. Of course there have been a few (emerge -uD world)'s here and there in the process. Maybe it's fixed? The only thing I hate more than intermittent problems is unrepeatable intermittent problems.

Memory test is on the to-do list. And I need to actually configure acpid to make sure it's not going to sleep. BIOS doesn't give any option to shut off power management.

Does this mean I should recompile my kernel without apm support? (in /var/log/messages)

```

Jun 14 16:20:26 methuselah kernel: apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 (Driver vers

ion 1.16ac)

Jun 14 16:20:26 methuselah kernel: apm: overridden by ACPI.

```

I also get a bunch of these with various kernel modules:

```

Jun 14 16:20:26 methuselah kernel: pcmcia_core: disagrees about version of symbol module_layout

Jun 14 16:20:26 methuselah kernel: pcmcia: disagrees about version of symbol module_layout

Jun 14 16:20:26 methuselah kernel: pata_pcmcia: disagrees about version of symbol module_layout

Jun 14 16:20:26 methuselah kernel: sata_promise: disagrees about version of symbol module_layout

```

Grasping at straws,

-syrex314

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## darc

I've similar problem. I don't know why but short time after my monitor goes to sleep xorg is unresponsive. I  know that this is only xorg related because on my desktop I also have sshd and NAT running and when my computer freezes this two work just fine. My workaround of this is to put 

```
xset -dpms &
```

in ~/.xinitrc

ps. my graphic driver is radeon (open source)

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