Ubuntu 16.04 freeze/crash

Question

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.

Solution

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.

Comments

[Admin]

Using the Nouveau driver for Intel HD Graphics is a major problem in itself. Nouveau is for Nvidia graphics only, so in a way, you are lucky to get it work somehow.

[Admin]

@mikewhatever you are right. I thought I was using the Nouveau driver but thats not true. It is selected as a third party driver because ubuntu detects the presence of a nvidia gtx 970m card. But the card is not connected to the monitor and is not being used. The machine is still crashing.

[Admin]

How much swap memory do you have ? freezes sometimes relate to system running out memory

[Admin]

CLOSE VOTERS The question is about supported release, with clear request of assisting in troubleshooting a specific issue. This is not off topic or too broad

[Admin]

@Serg. I have 32GB of memory with plenty of swap space.

[Admin]

OK. In that case, graphics issue it is , no other guesses.