Arch Linux

Smetterleen

Member

Registered: 2014-09-02

Posts: 13

Very Strange I/O Crashes

Hi all,

I have been having very strange crashes ever since I bought my current laptop (about 2 months ago). It is an ASUS UX305F.

The crashes usually occur in burst, multiple a day (usually very little time in between) and then nothing for a few days. When a crash happens, the following occurs:

* The application I'm currently working in closes or hangs for a few seconds and closes
* All other applications appear to stay responsive, but will close after working with them for a few seconds, however:
* Anything to do with reading/writing to my HDD is broken. Saving files will crash any application trying it, terminal emulator will not execute any command whatsoever. It gives 1 of 2 errors when I try to execute a command:

$ ls
`ls` command not found

or

$ ls
Input/Output error

* SSH sessions remain functional for as long as I have had the will to keep them going on an otherwise broken system
* All TTY's spew out an unreadable and unstoppable stream of errors

Until last week I was absolutely unable to reproduce these crashes, they seemed to occur at random. However, I have now discovered that they (mostly) seem to occur when I am editing certain files (in eclipse). Now once I find a line that induces the crash, I can reproduce it by typing a certain letter at a certain point in the line and saving the file. This works both in Eclipse and vim (I haven't tested any other editors).

Could it be that this is just a faulty laptop, or am I missing some Arch-fu needed to debug and fix this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Smetteleen

Last edited by Smetterleen (2015-07-17 17:06:39)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,654

Re: Very Strange I/O Crashes

Are you using an Intel processor?  Does it need microcode patches?

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Smetterleen

Member

Registered: 2014-09-02

Posts: 13

Re: Very Strange I/O Crashes

I don't think so. I've enabled microcode updates now and got the following output:

$ dmesg | grep microcode
[    0.363741] microcode: CPU0 sig=0x306d4, pf=0x80, revision=0x18
[    0.363753] microcode: CPU1 sig=0x306d4, pf=0x80, revision=0x18
[    0.363761] microcode: CPU2 sig=0x306d4, pf=0x80, revision=0x18
[    0.363768] microcode: CPU3 sig=0x306d4, pf=0x80, revision=0x18
[    0.363813] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 <tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>, Peter Oruba

which according to the wiki means no microcode update was applied...

Too bad but thanks for the suggestion!

Edit:
And I can now confirm with certainty it has not solved the situation as I have just experienced another crash.

Last edited by Smetterleen (2015-07-22 00:32:28)