Ubuntu

Hardy crashes/hangs.

Asked by laptoplinux

I have a situation in which after about 5 or 10 minutes post boot my laptop hangs or crashes.

I have only made to substantive changes on my system recently so suspect that one of them may be the cause.

The first is that I re-partitioned my hard drive so that HOME is on a separate partition. This was done on a clean install and I did notice an increase in boot time and a very slight performance hit but nothing so severe I couldn't live with it. I allocated 15GB's which Ubuntu states would be the max I would require.

The second change was that Hardy wasn't recognizing my CPU Frequency Scaling. After filing a bug report I found this solution under "Answers". http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=190921 It did fix my problem and I am using the powernowd tool.

How can I diagnose the cause of this problem and is it possible that either of these is the root cause? Essentially my laptop has been rendered unusable due to these crashes.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
laptoplinux
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
laptoplinux (laptoplinux) said : 		#1

I think that the hanging/Crashing/Performance problem I have been having is probably directly related to the fact that I enabled CPU Frequency scaling on my box. I noticed that I am frequently operating 175MHZ!!!???

Is there a way I can configure CPUFS? An what would be an optimal setting on the low end? This is my current Powernod output:

powernowd: PowerNow Daemon v0.97, (c) 2003-2006 John Clemens
powernowd: Settings:
powernowd: verbosity: 1
powernowd: mode: 1 (AGGRESSIVE)
powernowd: step: 100 MHz (100000 kHz)
powernowd: lowwater: 20 %
powernowd: highwater: 80 %
powernowd: poll interval: 1000 ms
powernowd: Found 1 scalable unit: -- 1 'CPU' per scalable unit
powernowd: cpu0: 175Mhz - 1400Mhz (8 steps)
powernowd: step1 : 1400Mhz
powernowd: step2 : 1225Mhz
powernowd: step3 : 1050Mhz
powernowd: step4 : 875Mhz
powernowd: step5 : 700Mhz
powernowd: step6 : 525Mhz
powernowd: step7 : 350Mhz
powernowd: step8 : 175Mhz

Revision history for this message
laptoplinux (laptoplinux) said : 		#2

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=190921

Although this solution enabled CPU Frequency stepping I suspect it caused serious performance issues because powernowd operated my CPU at the lowest step, 175MHZ, most of the time.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=582069

Outlined how I could configure my system to use a higher minimum speed/first step. I set mine to 62% (875MHZ) and my freezing/crashes seem to have gone away. Knock on wood. I will mark this as solved but if my machine starts to conk out again I will re-open it.Keeping my fingers crossed.

But still no drop in operating temps since enabling CPUFS.

Revision history for this message
laptoplinux (laptoplinux) said : 		#3

This was also very helpful. It shows how to change the frequency via the CPU Frequency Scaling Applet.

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/11/04/enabling-cpu-frequency-scaling/