Comment 8 for bug 1176647

For some other reason I switched my window manager to dwm and can now almost reliably reproduce the failure by simply starting a video in mplayer and wait for approx. 5 seconds. Before with gnome/metacity I could sometimes watch entire movies of multiple hours. Sometimes it would crash in between but sometimes not. However with dwm it crashes all the time and almost immediately.

Since even with sync I could not see a file (error_state) being written I finally got around to SSH into my maschine and observe the behaviour which is worse than expected. At the time the crash happens my SSH shell is also unreponsive any more which strongly hints that not only my X/display subsystem is broken but rather the whole kernel. Due to this I am unable to produce the error_state as the maschine is not responding to any commands (either 'sleep X && ' or SSH) as it is ~halted already.

This issue is really annoying and it can be assumed to be related to video playback of some kind as this is the only way i can reproduce it now.

By the way I upgraded to kernel 3.8.0-23-generic in the meantime.