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I've always had a problem running any sort of Linux distro on my machine. I'm a gamer and tend to spend most of my time in Windows and I have never had any issues when it comes to stability of my PC, however my computer will randomly choose to instantly power itself off before powering itself back on moments later.

I have experienced this same issue on Arch, Mint 14, Mint 15, Ubuntu 12.10, Ubuntu 13.04 and Ubuntu 14.04. I'm not sure what logs I should be looking at to diagnose the problem however I have noticed that running cat /var/log/syslog | grep panic after my computer boots back up shows messages relating to my GPU:

  • Apr 14 18:42:58 rob-X58A-UD3R kernel: [ 7.263046] radeon 0000:03:00.0: registered panic notifier

Weirdly though, I can sometimes replicate the power off by doing certain things, my most recent was an attempt to run sudo apt-get install gparted, which run fine up until it tried to unpackage it, then my computer powers itself off.

I'm hoping somebody could help me get to the bottom of why this keeps happening, even after so trying many revisions of the Linux Kernel.

Thanks

enter image description here System Specs:

  • Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 2.0)
  • GPU: Radeon HD 7979 (xserver-xorg-video-ati open sourcedriver)
  • Audio: ASUS Xonar D2X
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    Did you check the temperature of your processor? The system may turn itself off when it gets too hot.
    – Jos
    Apr 14, 2014 at 18:18
  • Yes, I don't believe this issue is temperature related as I've had it happen immediately after a cold boot after the computer has been off for hours. I have been using lm-sensors to monitor the temperatures and I haven't noticed anything being higher than it usually is in Windows.
    – Robula
    Apr 15, 2014 at 11:43
  • It happened again. This time I clicked the eject button on a USB stick in the "Disks" app. Another radeon registered panic notifier in /var/log/syslog
    – Robula
    Apr 16, 2014 at 21:43

2 Answers 2

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Ok, so I went to the AMD site to see if your drivers are correct, as AMD does release drivers for/supports Ubuntu. It seems like your graphics driver is not acting right, I am not sure if the open-source driver is working or not, but that could be why your computer is shutting down.

From:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

You would choose Desktop Graphics, Radeon HD Series, Radeon HD 7xxx Series PCIe *(NOTE), Linux x86_64 as the options.

*If you have it installed in an AGP slot it looks like it is not supported directly off of site.

The autodetect does not look like it is available for linux, so you will need to know what to select. Since your driver is for the gigabyte version of the amd radeon HD 7970, you should be able to use the drivers (I am guessing this is the correct video card?). If you don't want to do guess work.

check this link out:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/AMD

It has instructions on how to: install additional drivers, and set up Catalyst for non open source (proprietary) drivers.

I hope this will help you.

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  • Thank you for the answer. I will try this again when I get home later. However I have already tried installing the "14.3 LINUX Beta V1.0" on 14.04 and I had to reformat and re-install Ubuntu as it broke Unity or something. I could log in through LightDM but it just showed me my wallpaper and nothing else. I couldn't do anything and I couldn't find solid instructions on how to purge the driver and revert back to the open source driver.
    – Robula
    Apr 17, 2014 at 8:56
  • @Robula Does this help? askubuntu.com/questions/68306/… With the newest version you always are running a risk of it being unstable. Not sure if that really matters, but just something to look at as well. I still think something is up with the drivers/card only because normally it is a cpu/gpu/mb which will cause problems like this, or if you have an underpowered power supply. I can't see it as being a CPU/PS, only because you said it works fine in a Windows environment. The panic from radeon (graphics) seems to be what is f*n you up.
    – No Time
    Apr 18, 2014 at 5:39
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You may also want to try using the open source driver instead of the proprietary one so we can try to rule out if this is a system issue or a driver issue.

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