Re: www/chromium crashing whole system

On Sat, 13 Nov 2010, Alexander Best wrote:

>>> i tried detaching and attaching my keyboard after chromium crashed my 
>>> system and the lights of the keyboard didn't even went on. so in fact 
>>> everything crashed and not just X.
>> If I said it unclear, let me repeat, the usermode crash dump you got 
>> probably has nothing common with the kernel issue.
>
> oh sorry. indeed i misunderstood you there. well i guess this is the problem 
> most regular users have. we don't own any serial/firewire consoles. all i 
> can offer is to add kernel OPTIONS. however none of them seem to be able to 
> prevent the lock up and instead letting me enter the debugger or trigger a 
> kernel core dump.
>
> i even have watchdog running, but without any sucess. i guess all i can hope 
> for is that maybe at some point a kernel dump does make it to disk.

Do you have a second box you can run X11 on, and SSH into the box that will 
run Chromium?  If it is really Chromium triggering the crash, this might allow 
you to access the console when it crashes.  However, if it's Chromium 
triggering an X11-related crash, it might well not.  (Also, it might well not 
because of timing differences, but it is worth a try).

Another thing to consider is starting Chromium when switched to a text virtual 
console from X11, which would leave you in text mode for DDB, or at least let 
you see something interesting on the console.

If regular crashdumps appear unreliable, try setting up a textdump with an 
automatic reboot, that might provde more reliable (small chance, but it 
could).

Robert