I manage a fleet of Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 machines for my department, and for the last few months many of the physical workstations have been “randomly” hanging.
In one instance, there was kernel panic output on the screen, but since it hung, I couldn’t scroll up to see the important parts. So I’ve been trying to set things up to capture that output. I’ve tried netconsole and serial console over USB, but in both cases, I don’t get any kernel panic output. There’s also nothing in syslog, it just suddenly stops logging, and the next log message is from the next boot.
I’ve also tried kdump-tools, but it doesn’t produce any crash data.
I’m waiting on some adapters to try real serial ports, to see if I can capture the kernel panic output that way.
In the meantime, I’m wondering if anyone has any other ideas on how to capture kernel panic output, or on what might be causing hangs like this.
I also have a lot of virtual machines running basically the same Ubuntu configuration, but these are not hanging.
Thanks.
Ubuntu Version: 22.04, 20.04
Desktop Environment (if applicable): GNOME
Relevant System Information: HP Z2 G4 and Intel NUC workstations. Standard generic kernel provided by Canonical.
What I’ve Tried: netconsole, USB serial console, kdump-tools