Comment 22 for bug 585765

Okay, some progress. I was on a screen showing the System Monitor and some processor load widgets when I experienced my most recent "freeze". The System Monitor window went blank, but I could still move the mouse, and I could the processor load widgets kept running.... I could see that both cores had gone solidly to 100%. I clicked on the desktop icon for konsole.... about 5 minutes later, I got a pop up message saying that the application couldn't be started. I let the system continue to run for almost 20 minutes... the mouse and keyboard froze, however the system still responded quickly to external pings, and there was regular flashing of the disk activity light.... which I believe was from an HD-PVR recording to a separate drive that was in progress at the time of the freeze.

So, it's not a "real" freeze... something is stealing 100% CPU time, such that you can't even toggle numlock on the keyboard. The kernel is still alive.... responding to networking pings, and the HD-PVR driver is still taking data from USB and storing it to disk.

So, I started hunting logs from the time of the freeze. The attached kern.log shows what happened during that very busy period. The following message seems to have been the start my systems "flash forward" ;-) .... more info in the log.

Jun 1 14:25:04 family kernel: [52468.400821] BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 61s! [soffice.bin:6615]