Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 freeze/crash

16.04intel graphicsnouveau

I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. 14.04 was rock stable for more than a year that I used it. This should rule out most hardware issues. The only difference is that in 16.04 I'm using Nouveau drivers for the Intel HD Graphics that came with i7-6700 CPU. The computer randomly freezes and the only way to recover is to reboot. I have looked at syslog and kern.log but nothing obvious there. How do I troubleshoot this?

Going back to Nvidia GTX 970M is difficult as there are other issues there.

Best Answer

I tried disabling hardware acceleration in Google Chrome but that didn't help. And the system was freezing every few minutes/hours. So I went back to using Nvidia proprietary driver ( nvidia-364..which is the latest as of today). The computer no longer freezes. So I'm guessing either the Intel HD Graphics hardware is bad on my motherboard or there is a bug in Ubuntu support for Intel HD graphics.

These are the reasons I tried to move to Intel HD Graphics:

  1. My second UHD monitor was not being detected after login. In nvidia settings it showed up as disabled. Enabling the monitor in nvidia-settings-manager would not persist after a reboot. I deleted my ~/.config/monitors.xml file and also used the Ubuntu Displays utility to switch the monitor on. The displays utility asked me if I wanted to keep this configuration and I said Yes. This seems to have fixed the problem.

  2. The other problem was that monitors were not waking up from sleep. I had to reboot the system everytime monitors went to sleep or remember to manually switch off the monitors everytime I stepped away. This is not a problem with the Intel HD Graphics so I'm guessing there is a bug in the Nvidia Proprietary drivers. For now I have disabled sleep on the monitors and hopefully will remember to switch them off manually whenever I need to.

Hope all this helps someone.

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