Random system freeze (keyboard led blink)

[FiNeX]

Both Ubuntu and Kubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) have random freeze. The system doesn't respond on CTRL+ALT+CANC, ALT+SYSRQ, ALT+F[1..12]. I've to hard reboot.

When the system hang, keyboard leds "caps lock" and "scroll lock" start blinking.

The freeze occured during system installation and even after. The first time was doing an apt-get dist-upgrade (kubuntu), successively if freezed while I was closing firefox (with compiz enabled, on ubuntu), after it freezed during the re-installation process (kubuntu).

Before installing Feisty Fawn I've been using Dapper Drake with no problems. (I've tried to reinstall it and still it works... yeah). I've already tested the RAM, I've used differents hard disks, I've tried to use different video and audio device, but the problem still remain.

/var/log/messages is empty. After I'll post /var/log/syslog.

Hardware configuration:

Mainboard: EQS a28k6-al7
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+
RAM: 1x512Mb DDR 400Mhz

Lspci -vv output:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/130247/+attachment/3031687/+files/lspci%20-vv

[FiNeX (finex)]

The syslog file doesn't have useful informations.

[Wousser (wousser)]

Thanks for your bug report.
Please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingSystemCrash

[FiNeX (finex)]

I've already see that page.

The system doesn't crash at random interval, anyway I've done a memtest and all was ok (I've even tested the hard drive, moreover I've tested the system with different hard disk, video, and modem device).
The system doesn't crash doing a particular thing.
CTRL+ALT+... doesn't work
Alt+SysRq+... doesn't work

And finally, the SSH server... try to guess... It doesn't respond :-( :-( :-(

I've even tried different settings for the AGP on the BIOS with no luck.

I've tried with oher distro: on Debian I've the same problem, on Fedora (kernel 2.6.21, super patched), Slackware (kernel 2.6.21, vanilla) and Archlinux (kernel 2.6.22, it have less than 10 patch) the problem doesn't exist. I don't know why, my 6th sense say that it's a kernel related problem, maybe some particular patch applied to the kernel by both Debian and Ubuntu.

Tomorrow (If will be at home) I'll test the PC with gutsy gibbon alpha 4. I'll post here the results :-)

Hi!

[FiNeX (finex)]

I've tested the PC with Gutsy Gibbon Alpha 4 (kernel 2.6.22-9) I've had no crash. Maybe it was just a regression triggered by something. Well, in Gutsy the problem doesn't exist. Instead in Feisty the problem still exist, I don't know if let the bug open or closed.

[Wousser (wousser)]

If your bug doesn't exist in Gutsy please close the bug.

[FiNeX (finex)]

I'll wait the stable relase of gutsy for re-test those PC.

Bye

[P4man (duvel123)]

I have had the exact same problem after upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy (release version).
System froze for no apparent reason while surfing the web, caps lock and scroll lock leds blinking. Only a hard reboot worked. Never had anything like that under Feisty.

My hardware is completely different from the original poster, only thing in common is that I also have an Nvidia card (using nvidia binary drivers).

[Nilpohc (benoit-choplin)]

Same issue with Gutsy Gibbon with a RTL8180 chipset on a laptop :

lspci gives :
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8180L 802.11b MAC (rev 20)

I tried many solutions : native driver with network-manager, ndiswrapper driver with network-manager, wicd using wext or ndiswrapper mode. Whatever i do, as soon as the connection gets established (i mean right after WEP authentication on my ESSID) the system freezes and both the caps-lock and the scroll-lock keys are blinking together, requiring pushing up the power button.
No problem at all under Feisty Fawn, though i had to use ndiswrapper driver to get the card recognized under that version (no native support).

Please fix it, this is no exotic hardware. Other people, some with same harware, on ubuntu french forum) reported the same issue. It's always disapointing to get system freezes at a release stage.

[marc (markocpc)]

Hi all.

I've the same problem than Nilpohc (on french ubuntu forum) and with a laptop and gutsy gibbon too.
I'ts my pcmcia card (D-LINK DWL-G650+) cause the trouble:

lspci:
03:00.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface

lspci -v:
03:00.0 Network controller: Texas Instruments ACX 111 54Mbps Wireless Interface
        Subsystem: D-Link System Inc DWL-G650+ AirPlusG+ CardBus Wireless LAN
        Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 10
        Memory at 4c020000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Memory at 4c000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>

i'v succes one time to connect on a non secure network with wicd, doesn't work with network-manager.
Try to connect on a secure network with wep cause the freeze and blink the leds ...

On feisty no problems it works "Out of the box", under gutsy humm ....
I try this afternoon with ndiswrapper and post the result ...

[P4man (duvel123)]

Just to repeat: this problem also occurred on a desktop system, live CD environment, with no wireless cards in the machine, so I am not convinced it is related to wifi

[Nilpohc (benoit-choplin)]

Hi again,

We finally both found a workaround, which seems obvious now when looking back at the documentation from the community, though our chipsets were not specifically listed in that part (and mine was even considered as good).

The solution was to unload (using rmmod) and blacklist the module (in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist) before installing and activating the ndiswrapper and the windows driver.

@P4man : you were right, i read your previous to fast and was too much focused on the blinking leds part. Anyway, it seems that a corrupted or bugged module is also your problem so it may be a track to follow if not already done. Good luck to you then.

Given P4man's comment, this bug should not be closed despite me and marc got our specific problem solved.

[P4man (duvel123)]

Happened again twice today. For no apparent reason. Log files don't show anything suspicious (to my untrained eye), although the last lines before the crash do related to (wireless) networking:

Oct 23 22:40:28 bob-desktop NetworkManager: <info> Updating allowed wireless network lists.
Oct 23 22:40:28 bob-desktop NetworkManager: <WARN> nm_dbus_get_networks_cb(): error received: org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo.NoNetworks - There are no wireless networks stored..
Oct 23 22:40:47 bob-desktop kernel: [ 193.119366] device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
Oct 23 22:40:47 bob-desktop kernel: [ 193.119375] audit(1193172046.887:5): dev=eth0 prom=256 old_prom=0 auid=4294967295

I don't know if these are suspicious, they look normal to me. Next line is restart.

Note again this machine has *NO* wlan card. Just an onboard intel NIC.

Question: has anyone had this problem with an ATI or intel videocard ? So far, nVidia videocards its the only common thing I have found in the reports I found here and elsewhere.

Question 2: who decides "importance" of this bug? This seems a pretty ugly bug to me, hard freezing really is a serious in my book, especially when it happens on a brand new install or even live CD (!). I see a lot of confirmed bugs labeled "critical" that seem quite less important than this one.

[P4man (duvel123)]

Maybe this will help track down the cause: today it happened again, several times. At one point, I noticed windows where closing for no reason. Thunderbird was running in the background, firefox was active, and suddenly I noticed thunderbird "disappear". I restarted it, it closed again within seconds. Then firefox just closed. I tried opening a system monitor, it closed before it really opened. As if alt+F4 key where stuck. Second later the whole system froze with those dreaded blinking LEDs.

[P4man (duvel123)]

update: I'm not quite sure, but I may have found the problem in my case: a bad harddrive. Windows starting freezing as well when accessing a disk I use to share data between Ubuntu and windows. I replaced the drive, and so far Gutsy seems stable. its only been 12 or so hours, so its too early to know for sure, but it looks promising.

[Jon Martin Berntsen (jberntsen)]

I seem to have this bug in 7.10. I have to test some more.

[Jon Martin Berntsen (jberntsen)]

The only way to shut machine down seems to be holding in the powerbuttom til it shuts down. I'm on an dell inspiron 1501 with amd. It's been fine for a long time, but today when I used "DeVeDe" it's shut down on me twice. I was runing DeVeDe both times, and it didn't lock up at any particular stage of the process of making the dvd. I don't know if this helps at all. Sorry, I'm not a very technical person.

[Nick Russell (thatnick)]

I have this in 8.04 beta keyboard leds "caps lock" and "scroll lock" blink. System is completely frozen.

[Jon Martin Berntsen (jberntsen)]

It seems to be triggered by sertain programs, in 7.10 i get this when i use
a package of mplayer (the no gui one) and rtorrent. As soon as I stopped
using those I didn't get anny more chrashes.

2008/3/27, Nick Russell <email address hidden>:
>
> I have this in 8.04 beta keyboard leds "caps lock" and "scroll lock"
> blink. System is completely frozen.
>
> --
> Random system freeze (keyboard led blink)
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/130247
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[ivrtaric (ivrtaric)]

Happened to me twice today on 7.10. Never had this problem before, system is about a month old. I had Firefox, Thunderbird, KTorrent and Pidgin running.

[Stefan Kull (stefan-kull)]

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta (2.6.24-12-generic) using both Gnome and KDE4

Random hanging leaving [Caps lock] and [Scroll lock] LED-blinking...
...only way out is to reboot by unplugging batteries and power adapter.

I previously used the same LapTop (Dell Latitude C810) with 7.10 without any problem...
Differences between my old 7.10 installation vs. my new 8.04 beta installation:
- With 7.10 i used wired-LAN, now with 8.04 beta i using WiFi-card

LEDS:
- Num_lock OFF
- Caps_lock BLINKING
- Scroll_lock BLINKING

HW:
- Dell Latitude C810 (1GHz, 512MB and build in 32Mb Nvidia graphics)
- D-Link DWL-G630 (pc-card Wifi adapter)

TRIGGING THIS SYSTEM FREEZE
I do not know! The last two times is happened was when I:
1. Only having a console running "sudo apt-get install kde4"
2. Only having FireFox 3 Beta 4 running with 6 tabs
...it might could have something to do with current workload of the PC?

[ivrtaric (ivrtaric)]

Happened again, twice, about 10 minutes after I started KTorrent. I was using Firefox and Thunderbird without any problems before running KTorrent. Logs show that there were some issues with network on my EpoX 8RDA+ motherboard.

[Jon Martin Berntsen (jberntsen)]

rtorrent does it for me, as soon as i stopped using it...no problem!

2008/4/1, ivrtaric <email address hidden>:
>
> Happened again, twice, about 10 minutes after I started KTorrent. I was
> using Firefox and Thunderbird without any problems before running
> KTorrent. Logs show that there were some issues with network on my EpoX
> 8RDA+ motherboard.
>
>
> --
> Random system freeze (keyboard led blink)
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/130247
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Jon Martin Berntsen (jberntsen)]

It happend again, I was using amarok, editing the track name or artist and it just froze.

[Tomas Binek (tomasbinek)]

This bug still exists in Kubuntu 8.04 stable .
Maybe it is rtorrent related, as sugested above ( I have rtorrent running all the time ).
Computer hangs only when watching videos on youtube.
No other apparent reason. In the middle of a video. Hang, no response to anything ( even cursor frozen ), one audio sample playing over and over, led blinking as described.
Have to reset the PC.

P.S. My hardware is completely different from all previous posters. ( ATi Radeon, Asus MB ) , so I guess this isn't hardware related at all.

[FiNeX (finex)]

I don't think the freeze is related to rtorrent or amarok, or ktorrent [...], when initially I've reported this bug, I wasn't using these software.

The problem is not related to closed source video driver.

The problem is not related to a specific chipset or hardware configuration.

Should this problem be caused by a kernel patch?

[Jon Martin Berntsen (jberntsen)]

I have been using 8.04 for a while now, and the problem seems to be
completely gone. Using the standard gnome system.
When I was using 7.10 I tried rtorrent, and thats when I had the most
problems with this. The thing that bugged me the most was that I could never
get a descent logfile that could tell me what was wrong...

2008/5/12 FiNeX <email address hidden>:

> I don't think the freeze is related to rtorrent or amarok, or ktorrent
> [...], when initially I've reported this bug, I wasn't using these
> software.
>
> The problem is not related to closed source video driver.
>
> The problem is not related to a specific chipset or hardware
> configuration.
>
> Should this problem be caused by a kernel patch?
>
> --
> Random system freeze (keyboard led blink)
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/130247
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Tomas Binek (tomasbinek)]

Maybe this hang is in the combination of running software.

Today, I discovered this:
When watching videos on youtube ( no torrent soft. running ), sometimes the "nspluginviewer" crashes with SIGSEGV -> video disappears ( leaves a gray rectangle ) and a sound sample is playing over and over. But the Caps and Scroll leds do not blink.

If I have rtorrent running, the behaviour is similar. Hang at random time, sound sample repeating, but no crash reporting window appears. It looks like the system freezes at the moment it's trying to generate the report.
( but I don't have a clue how the blinking leds fit into this scenario ).

[vominh (kindduck2004)]

Hi ALL,
   I also read whole of this thread but there is no way to resolve my fault.
I'm also running Gusty Gibbon 7.10 in my PC that has information as below:
- intel 8IR533 motherboard ( no have On-board Video adapter)
- ASUS Radeon 9200 128 MBs AGP 8x.
- DDRAM 512 MBs Bus 400
- HDD: 80 GBs

I'll installed this Gusty version in my HDD but it keeps 3 VFAT( FAT32) partitions. I configured partitions belows:
primary partition (~ totals 8GB)
/boot ext3 100 MB
/swap ext3 1024 MB
/sda3 physical volume 7GBs
/sda5 Extend partition ( 70 GB)
/sda6 vfat 20 GBs
/sda7 physical volume 17 GB
/sda8 physical volume 23 GB
/sda9 vfat 10 GBs

define volume group in VolGroup00 in 3 physical volumes
/ is LVM that occupied VolGroup00

My computer is sometimes hang in situations such as 'when login to Desktop' or booting. The capslock and scrollLock was blinking while the numLock isn't light. It cause me reset hardly. I try to see /var/log/message but it don't have any erros. I thinks that the fault can be in my AGP card or CPU is too hot or I had partition my HDD rather strangely.

I used to this Gusty in my company's computer 1 years ago. I've never met this problem before. If anybody has experienced with it. Please give me advise.

Many thanks

[sginer (giner-stephane)]

Hi,

I have the same pb on my computer since Kubuntu 8.4 (on 8.4, 8.10 and 9.4).

Pb is present on the live cd to. After the x server start, the pc freeze.

My computer is an athlon 1800+ with nvidia card and 768 Mb of memory.

Regards.

[P4man (duvel123)]

AFAIK, blinking led's indicate a kernel panic. If this happens at random,
with all recent ubuntu releases and even in a live CD environment, you most
likely have a hardware problem. Bad RAM would be the first thing to check
for (run memory diagnostics on the live cd, let it run overnight. If you
have any errors at all, change your RAM, or relax your timings in the BIOS).
CPU overheating or a bad power supply are two other common culprits. Just
dont try to fix a hardware problem through software, it won't work.

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 1:47 PM, sginer <email address hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have the same pb on my computer since Kubuntu 8.4 (on 8.4, 8.10 and
> 9.4).
>
> Pb is present on the live cd to. After the x server start, the pc
> freeze.
>
> My computer is an athlon 1800+ with nvidia card and 768 Mb of memory.
>
> Regards.
>
> --
> Random system freeze (keyboard led blink)
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/130247
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Yoan TY (yoantriconyvray)]

carte mère asus a7n8x-la socket a, processeur amd 2000+ ,carte graphique nvidia mx440

installation ubuntu 10.04LTS
installation sans problème jusqu' 60% environ puis
erreur, l'installation passe alors en mode graphique
je me retrouve dans ubuntu, une fenêtre démarrrage tente de s'afficher en vain, multiplication dans barre des taches = redémarrer

essais changement disque dur, barettes, formatage etc... no success

leds clavier clignotantes = kernel panic

=========== " incompatibilté donc ! "

Voir réponse P4man

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Cut from the Bug Description

[penalvch (penalvch)]

FiNeX, this bug report is being closed due to your last comment regarding this being fixed with an update. For future reference you can manage the status of your own bugs by clicking on the current status in the yellow line and then choosing a new status in the revealed drop down box. You can learn more about bug statuses at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Status. Thank you again for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please submit any future bugs you may find.