Hello all. My Ubuntu 11.10 installation seems to suddenly lock up. I cannot move my mouse or use the keyboard, all screen activity stops, and I have to do a hard reboot. Is there an y method to repair this? It started a few days ago.
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This question should instead be filed as a bug report, and as such is off-topic, thanks! Instructions on filing a bug report are here.– Jorge CastroJun 12, 2012 at 19:31
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1@JorgeCastro In my opinion, this is not a bug, but a valid question(I assume you thought of a memory leak), but this is a user trying to get help with freezing(containing instructions that other users may use to diagnose constant hangs) and possibly adding badram addresses to the grub config to avoid bad areas.– nanofaradJun 12, 2012 at 20:22
1 Answer
Before you panic, try the magic SysRq trick. Find the key on your keyboard labelled PRT SCRN|SYSRQ(Could be arranged differently). Hold that key, ALT and M. This invokes the Linux oom_kill which could aid in recovering. Also, try this with B instead of M and see it it reboots then. If it does, then you are either out of memory(If you have a swap partition, your disk may be active), or you have another software issue. If not, it is hardware. Try pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 during the freeze. Does that work? If so, you can use top
after logging in to ascertain the process causing the issue.
Try running vmstat 1
in the Teminal. In a comment, tell us your swapin and swapout values.
Also ,try running top
, giving us the top %CPU
values, then pressing SHIFT+O, then Q or T, then ENTER. and the RSS and SHR values of the top processes. This can help pinpoint the cause. Also, are you using Skype, by any chance? There is a reported memory leak in it.
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I followed your first instruction and the only thing my OS did was it captured the screen couple of times– AlenJun 11, 2012 at 20:48
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swapin 0 swapout 1484, that's the min and max values. top - 23:02:36 up 10 min, 1 user, load average: 1.64, 1.76, 1.20 Tasks: 155 total, 3 running, 152 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 4.0%us, 2.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 92.9%id, 0.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st Mem: 993648k total, 895432k used, 98216k free, 89128k buffers Swap: 1013756k total, 11072k used, 1002684k free, 190168k cached– AlenJun 11, 2012 at 21:02
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Were you holding ALT when tried to use the key combo? Or do you have a separate SysRQ key? Also, is the info about memory from after the lockup or before(using the terminal given with ctrl +alt+F1)? Were you able to switch to a terminal using that key combo? Jun 11, 2012 at 22:16