Random system shutdowns, asking for help understanding logs and troubleshooting

kelltech · 08-14-2021, 06:51 AM

Hello,

I'm using Pop_OS and was not quite sure where to ask for help, I hope this is ok. If not, I'll gladly move this post to wherever may be best.

My laptop has been experiencing random shutdowns and I've been trying to learn how to troubleshoot and discover the root problem. I am not new to Linux, but I am new to this level of troubleshooting, so I know I'm going to get some of the terminology wrong, but I am here to learn!

What I've done so far is looked through the /var/log/journal and have executed

Code:

last -x shutdown | head -1 and last -x shutdown | head -3

just after a crash, but it showed last shutdown was 3 days prior.

Then I checked

Code:

last -x reboot | head -1

and it showed a reboot of a much closer time, so I started combing through /var/log/syslog for more clues but found nothing that I understood to be an issue, and/or didn't know what I was looking for.

I also installed

Quote:

auditd

but haven't had a crash since, so nothing to report there yet.

Then I executed

Code:

sudo grep -iv ': starting\|kernel: .*: Power Button\|watching system buttons\|Stopped Cleaning Up\|Started Crash recovery kernel' \
  /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog /var/log/apcupsd* \
  | grep -iw 'recover[a-z]*\|power[a-z]*\|shut[a-z ]*down\|rsyslogd\|ups'

That produced all kinds of bold red text, including this error which I saw a few times very near the time of a system crash:

Code:

/var/log/syslog:Aug 13 17:49:17 pop-os gsd-power[1388]: gsd-power: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.

I can post the entire report if needed, or anything else that may be helpful. I would like to ask for help troubleshooting and understanding these logs, hopefully to determine if I have faulty hardware or something else.

This random shutdown issue did not happen with Manjaro but did with Fedora. After several shutdowns on Fedora, I m,oved to Pop_OS where it's begun happening again. I've been monitoring CPU and GPU temps, especially while gaming and they rarely exceed 70C (but were hitting 90C+ in Fedora). While it might be a bad sensor somewhere, my laptop isn't running exceptionally hot as far as I can tell.

I do appreciate any help learning, understanding, and hopefully finding the problem!

My laptop:
Sager NP6852 (Clevo N850HK1)
7th gen Intel i7-7700HQ
NVIDIA GeForce GTX1050Ti

smallpond · 08-16-2021, 10:52 AM

The typical reason for not seeing an error in the log or a reason in wtmp is, unfortunately, a disk error. If the disk has an error and gets remounted read-only then obviously no log or shutdown reason can be written. Back up your files and run a disk test.

pan64 · 08-16-2021, 11:01 AM

I would rather [try to] check what's happened right before the boot message in the syslog.