Comment 737 for bug 993187

"Me too".

I have an Intel i7-920 desktop machine with Lucid 10.04 64bit on it (kernel 2.6.33 from TRIM), it is pretty much on all day long and used fairly heavily (java, virtualbox, flash, browsers, music, videos, movies). It is not shut down, only suspended (it is connected to an UPS), it has gone even weeks without a reboot.
It randomly freezes, no mouse, no keyboard, no ping. Only a hard reset helps.
The funny thing is, these lock-ups are very very random. Sometimes it locks up when the computer is idling, nobody's at the keyboard, there's no user activity. The frequency of the lock-ups seems random also. No lock-up for a month, or two, then suddenly bam! In the 4 year time it's been up, it locked maybe a dozen times, maybe 20 times.
I changed the VGA card, I changed the PSU, it did not help.

In december I got a Lenovo ThinkPad W530, with Ivy Bridge i7-3720QM, 16GB RAM. It ran Win7 for a month, without issues. A couple of weeks ago I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it, and started to use it daily (transitioning from the desktop I've described above). Moved stuff to the laptop and I'm working on it as I was on the desktop, doing the same things.

Today... bam! It froze. No mouse, no keyboard, no ping, nothing. Hard reset. Lost a couple of files (had backup). Only the integrated video is enabled in the BIOS, using Gnome Classic with no effects.

I also have another desktop at home, an AMD Phenom X6 1090T, with Lucid 10.04 64bit running on it for years (with 2.6.33 kernel for TRIM), no freezes. Last year upgraded to 12.04 LTS 64bit, not one freeze since then.

I also have another older HP Core2Duo T8300 laptop at work which is pretty much a workstation. I've been using it for years, first with 10.04 64bit, then with 12.04 64bit. It stays plugged in and running for weeks on a docking station, it gets hammered with Virtualbox, Java, browsers etc. and it did NOT freeze once.

All these machines have sort of the same setup, an SSD boot disk some harddisks for storage.

I'm also managing some 50 Lucid 10.04 32bit LTS Server Edition servers installed in different places, all have i3 or i7-2600 CPUs, 4-8GB RAM and are hammered through LTSP from 20-30 terminals (mainly firefox). These servers also are locking up once in a while, at random and not neccesarily when under load. There is no monitor and keyboard attached to them as they are servers, so I don't actually know what's happening, all I know is they need to be reset because they can't be accessed on the network. When I tried to reproduce the problem with one of them, I couldn't. It ran for a week and never froze.

Before the i3/i7 hardware, I had some other older Intel hardware on these 50 machines, with the same 10.04 LTSP install (it's actually an image file that gets installed everywhere), and we did not have random freezes at all.

Oh, almost forgot... I also have another HP server with an Intel Xeon E5404 with 8GB RAM, Ubuntu 10.04 64bit installed a year ago, it's up 24/7, no freezes.

I'm not sure what to make of all this, but it _seems_ that i3/i7 just freezes. That's the only common thing with these. Also the older hardware doesn't seem to freeze, AMD doesn't seem to freeze. Again, the freezing is very random and relatively rare, but still...