Random Siezes/Reboots

[Therac-25]

Don't know if this is something specific to Linux (a driver issue), or it might be symptomatic of a deeper hardware issue.

Basically, for the last week or so, my box has been randomly rebooting every six or eight hours or so. I can't find any commonality between the reboots. Sometimes it happens when I watch movies, some times I just come back to it and it's rebooted back to the login screen.

The reboots look like the box siezing up for about three seconds, before it kicks into a reboot. The kernel (I'm guessing?) gets to write something in /var/log/messages before it kicks the bucket:

Code: Select all

iwarford@motoko:/var/log$ grep signal messages
Feb 14 15:03:23 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 14 15:11:04 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 14 16:48:57 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 14 16:56:33 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 14 17:11:45 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 14 17:21:11 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 15 13:59:23 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 15 14:07:40 motoko exiting on signal 15
Feb 15 14:54:20 motoko exiting on signal 15

Those are happening before some of the reboots. If those are there, they're always just before a reboot. But they aren't before every reboot (motoko is the hostname, not a program or something).

Anyway, I'm guessing this is some kind of either hardware or driver issue, but I can't for the life of me isolate it. I've turned off everything -- compositing, compiz, sound, acceleration, etc -- I was running barebones openbox for a while, and it happened in there as well. I downgraded the nvidia drivers back to 177, and it was still happening with them.

What kind of hardware faults look like this? Could it be something like a loose cable? Faulty USB port? Static or electrical noise? I can't seem to blame it on software or drivers (at least none of the obvious drivers -- for all I know it could be the USB driver or something stupid). I don't have anything extra installed that looks like a driver. All the weird FUSE stuff is shut off.

I'm about to do a reinstall just to try and fix it, but I don't see that making much difference if it's a hardware fault.

[axbaby]

google seems to have seen this problem before exiting on signal 15 linux

for example
I think I might have solved my problem. It wasn't restarting, but actually logging me out of session(or whatever its called).

It was my graphics driver that suddenly went beserk.(It was working fine before). The moment I tried to go change my screen saver, or start glxgears, it would kick me back to the login screen.

My guess is that my "reboots" were actually the screensaver kicking it, then mucking up and sending me back to the login screen.

So once I reinstalled the drivers(though envy (http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html)) then its back to normal(I hope).

Hopefully it doesn't happen again. Hopefully this can help someone solve the problem too

Cheers,
Kinson

[^misantropia^]

Signal 15 == SIGTERM so something, probably init, is killing everything off before rebooting. Weird problem, might have a myriad causes. Is this on a desktop or a laptop? Anything unusual in /var/spool/cron/crontabs?

[Therac-25]

Signal 15 == SIGTERM so something, probably init, is killing everything off before rebooting. Weird problem, might have a myriad causes. Is this on a desktop or a laptop? Anything unusual in /var/spool/cron/crontabs?

Can't go back in time and check, unfortunately. I just reinstalled everything, decided to take the opportunity to try out 64-bit to see if it's actually any different. Uptime has passed a day, so I'm guessing I managed to bork the installation somehow by doing something to a driver somewhere.