Comment 526 for bug 1690085

I'm one of the users James mentioned early on; I don't know how to capture kernel output when I'm greeted with a completely-locked-up or already-rebooted machine. If it's hardware, I don't see what the kernel could do anyway.

I've tried all the tricks mentioned here, when applicable. (My BIOS doesn't expose anything like "typical current idle", etc.)

The only way I've been able to keep this system stable is to keep it busy. I run BOINC and donate some of this shark-style swim-or-die CPU to medical research. There are some nice settings for how the cores get used, and according to htop, tasks get shuffled around to all cores, if that matters. I went with using at most 50% of 25% of the cores (figures I pulled out of ...thin air). That keeps my load average around 2 when I'm doing nothing, but whatever - it's for a good cause.

My CPU is an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X with 8 or 16 cores depending on how one counts, and keeping them from getting bored has, so far, let me get back to rebooting on my terms (upgrades) rather than at random.

This comes up as a Linux problem, but it sure smells like a hardware defect to me. In my mind, all the self-monitoring and user-spying and background-indexing and auto-downloading that Windows does happens to mask this problem for most people. (Plus who would think twice about a randomly-hanging or -rebooting Windows box?) Has anyone run *BSD or FreeDOS or something else which would allow a Ryzen to get bored for hours/days?