Ytdyklly

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 on a Dell E5580. I didn't have any kind of problem for a month or two, but I've been experiencing screen freezes once or twice a day, for the last week.

A couple of clues:

• After the freeze, between the GRUB screen and the login screen some messages flash across the screen too fast to capture, but they appear to be about orphaned inodes. Is there some file wher these are saved?


• The freeze usually (always??) happens after the computer has been
  
  sitting for a while.


• 
  

  Often but not always, the screen looks something
  like this:

  
  
  

  

  
  


• 
  

  Or this:

  
  
  

  

  
  

Which seems to suggest a video driver problem. The only significant hardware change I've made in the last few weeks is to add a nvidia driver. Suspecting this to be the culprit, I purged the driver, but the problem continues.

Here's the output of lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 5904 (rev 02)

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 5916 (rev 02)

00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 02)

00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 21)

00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Thermal subsystem (rev 21)

00:15.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller (rev 21)

00:15.1 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller (rev 21)

00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI (rev 21)

00:17.0 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile SATA Controller [RAID mode] (rev 21)

00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d10 (rev f1)

00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d12 (rev f1)

00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PCI Express Root Port (rev f1)

00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Device 9d4e (rev 21)

00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PMC (rev 21)

00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 9d71 (rev 21)

00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus (rev 21)

00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (4) I219-LM (rev 21)

01:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS525A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)

02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 24fd (rev 78)

03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 134e (rev a2)

There have been many postings on this forum about this kind of problem.

This site suggests going to Software and updates -> Additional drivers, looking for Unknown-Unknowns and checking "Using Processor Microcode"
Here's the page that I see:

When I click on "Using Processor Microcode" the change doesn't take affect, the gui reverts to the above displayed screen.

Another suggestion, from this site and also this site is to change the line in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash intel_idle.max_cstate=1"

I tried this but the problem continues.

I've looked in dmesg and /var/log/syslog, but I can't find anything that looks as though it might be helpful in either of these logs, but then I don't know what to look for.

Would greatly appreciate any help!

Thanks.

Not sure if you ever got an answer to this, but I had a very similar issue just start happening to me.

I have an HP Officejet Pro 8600 all in one printer/copier ... Instead of running the drivers provided by the Ubuntu distribution, and had (at some time back) installed the packages straight from HP.

Since this was only happening when I was trying to scan in photo's or access photos I decided to remove that old driver and install the latest from the distribution.

apt-get install --reinstall hplip

did the trick for me. It re-installed several packages and so far the problem hasn't happened again.

Hope this helps a little.