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My Mint Cinnamon system on Lenovo g565 keeps hanging every several hours. I think the problem may be somehow connected with network and desktop environment, because either plugging ethernet cable (even if ethernet is used locally only) or switching to terminal eliminates the problem . If I try to use WiFi without ethernet plugged - system hangs in couple of hours.

I see no common pattern in kernel logs after it. If I am getting the idea right - it means that system can't write to HDD at that moment? I can't use netconsole, because my wifi doesn't support spooling and with ethernet plugged problem doesn't show itself.

How can I diagnose and eleminate the problem in such situation?

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If your system experiences a kernel panic, you wont see this in log, as interrupts aren't available anymore, so no data can be written to HDD.

Basically catching a random kernel panic is tricky. Either keep you system in text mode console until the problem appears (Be sure to switch off all display energy saving mechanisms, as a suspended screen may not turn on again) or you can use a serial port to log kernel messages there to another device. See the section "Serial console" here: Ubuntu Kernel Debugging Tricks

The serial option requires additional hardware (USB->Serial Cable) but you stated, that leaving the system in terminal mode doesn't trigger the problem, so serial would probably be the way to go.

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    FYI: Not all kernel panics work like this (some, for example, leave the system running and wind up getting written to the kernel log on disk). I suggest fixing your first paragraph. Also, efi-pstore might work. Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 21:54
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    (kexec -p is another option...) Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 22:11
  • Thanks for your input - I'm not super familiar with kernel panics (which I define as oops in the interrupt handler), but my knowledge was, that panics never appears in logs, as the kernel has already failed at this point (No interrupts, no disks writes) - Kernel Oops outside the interrupt handler however appear usually in logs. efi-pstore is unknown to me, so feel free to add information about this! Commented Feb 9, 2015 at 22:15

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