The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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Does anyone know where Debian keeps info on hardware failures? When playing 3D games my system suddenly goes blank or hangs with the audio looping. /var/log/faillog is empty and messages and syslog don;t contain any information about the failure, either.
 
Friendly Primarina said:
dmesg and journalctl don;t have anything about errors, either. Well, except errors from sr0, but they happen throughout the day. This is really weird.
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If you have to reboot then it might be a disk error and then it's unable to write the error to the log. You can ssh in from somewhere else and run "dmesg --follow" or sudo as needed and watch it from another system while it crashes.

Also "mcelog" should get hardware faults.
 
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Quick question for the thead: why does Ubuntu absolutely destroy my battery power? On battery power, it lasts maybe four hours when it lasted nearly 10 just a couple weeks ago when it still ran Windows.

It's really the only problem I'm having since switching over, it's not a big deal but I am curious. What is the technical reason behind this?
 
TsundereDev said:
Quick question for the thead: why does Ubuntu absolutely destroy my battery power? On battery power, it lasts maybe four hours when it lasted nearly 10 just a couple weeks ago when it still ran Windows.

It's really the only problem I'm having since switching over, it's not a big deal but I am curious. What is the technical reason behind this?
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It's more Linux in general than it is Ubuntu (although I imagine that Ubuntu also has some bloat that would be draining the charge more than slimmer distros like Arch and friends).

The technical reason for it is that Windows has a whole bunch of software/driver optimizations that help it get the most out of hardware. It comes with the territory: Windows dominates the market share for desktops, so if you're writing (closed-source) drivers to get your hardware/peripherals to work on consumer computers then you're aiming for Windows pretty much exclusively. Granted, that's slowly starting to change (maybe) with things like SteamOS and more people interested in getting their shit to work properly with the Linux kernel, but in general it's still the case that your hardware is going to run better, be more performant, and be more energy-efficient on Windows typically.
 
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davids877 said:
If you have to reboot then it might be a disk error and then it's unable to write the error to the log. You can ssh in from somewhere else and run "dmesg --follow" or sudo as needed and watch it from another system while it crashes.

Also "mcelog" should get hardware faults.
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If it's a disk error that would explain why sometimes I can play for ages and sometimes it hangs within a few minutes. On the one hand I hope you're right because that isolates the problem; on the other hand I hope you're wrong because the disk in question is an m.2 SSD (:_(

Thanks to everyone who replied so far, though. My favorite thing about this thread is that it's 100x more helpful than any distro's official forums :story:
 
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Friendly Primarina said:
If it's a disk error that would explain why sometimes I can play for ages and sometimes it hangs within a few minutes. On the one hand I hope you're right because that isolates the problem; on the other hand I hope you're wrong because the disk in question is an m.2 SSD (:_(

Thanks to everyone who replied so far, though. My favorite thing about this thread is that it's 100x more helpful than any distro's official forums :story:
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Run a test or two on the drive and see what it turns up. You can run smartctl tests without powering off.
Bash: 
#Start the test
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdx

#Check results after test
#basic info
sudo smartctl -H /dev/sdx

#many word (better imo)
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdx
 
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Friendly Primarina said:
If it's a disk error that would explain why sometimes I can play for ages and sometimes it hangs within a few minutes. On the one hand I hope you're right because that isolates the problem; on the other hand I hope you're wrong because the disk in question is an m.2 SSD (:_(

Thanks to everyone who replied so far, though. My favorite thing about this thread is that it's 100x more helpful than any distro's official forums :story:
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tbh that sounds more like bad ram than a bad drive.
 
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I'd always take a good look at the power supply, most hardware problems in my experience start there. It's underestimated what strange, transient problems a bad power supply can cause. Playing a game on most computers is a situation where the power supply has to do the most work of all usage cases of that particular system and weaknesses often show there, especially since the load of the power supply can also wildly fluctuate with whatever happens in the game. When a voltage goes out of spec and a point of load regulator somewhere is slightly out of it's tolerances and just can't deliver anymore and a component basically brown-outs, the failure can come so quickly on such a low level that no part has time to record anything before nothing works. I'd try one of these GPU bechmarks. If they consistently produce crashes it's probably either the power supply or the GPU. If they don't, I'd put a CPU stress test on while the GPU benchmark is running. If the system crashes then it's probably the power supply.

Knight of the Rope said:
It's more Linux in general than it is Ubuntu (although I imagine that Ubuntu also has some bloat that would be draining the charge more than slimmer distros like Arch and friends).

The technical reason for it is that Windows has a whole bunch of software/driver optimizations that help it get the most out of hardware. It comes with the territory: Windows dominates the market share for desktops, so if you're writing (closed-source) drivers to get your hardware/peripherals to work on consumer computers then you're aiming for Windows pretty much exclusively. Granted, that's slowly starting to change (maybe) with things like SteamOS and more people interested in getting their shit to work properly with the Linux kernel, but in general it's still the case that your hardware is going to run better, be more performant, and be more energy-efficient on Windows typically.
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While that can be true it's also true that a lot of hardware companies like intel have engineers in kernel development nowadays so the hardware support for many more common parts is actually fairly comprehensive, it depends a bit on what exactly we're talking about. Also in many modern parts a lot of the low-level stuff happens exclusively in baked-in firmware nowadays, the OS doesn't really have that much of an influence anymore.

I mentioned it earlier but I have a small Celeron Netbook that I tested Lubuntu on (basically just to look at the hardware through Linux, didn't even want to bother with the default Win10 setup on there) and with that particular Ubuntu there was a constant, significant background load that would just not stop and would not let my CPU cores sleep or even clock down properly. I don't know what it was and I didn't feel like researching because there was just so much going on on that system in the background. Also important - Ubuntu apparently didn't have the firmware blobs for vp9/h265 (which places like youtube often serve by default now) hardware video decoding by default and that hardware decoding actually working can have a significant influence on your battery life if that's something you do a lot. It's kinda wonky and fragile in Linux and not a feature that has existed in browsers until recently, so you actually kinda have to make sure that it actually works. It's not that Linux in general can't do it, it's more that the setup has to be proper. Also Linux doesn't support DRM stuff properly and places like Netflix will always do software decoding, no matter what your setup is.

There's generally a plethora of settings from wireless power to things like above that can have an influence on the battery life and can be setup just right to save the most amount of battery. With a drastic reduction from 10 to 4 hours I'd go ahead and say there's a software problem somewhere.
 
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