Linux Mint / LinuxCNC 2.8.0 freezing - SOLVED?

Hmmph. That didn't stick. I started to get freezes again and in the end they were as little as 10 mins apart. No issues shown through the memory tests. I even did a fresh install of Debian on the same SSD without LinuxCNC and it froze too. Enough.

I made a complete new install of Mint 20 on a different (Samsung) SSD at the weekend and just installed 2.8.2. So far it seems to be stable. There's always the possibility it's the motherboard, so I can never be 100% certain if a freeze is seconds away. Fingers remain tightly crossed again.....

Quick update on this. It's still randomly freezing, although it typically runs for several days between freezes. None of the system test tools find anything of concern and this is a new SSD with a fresh install of Mint 20 and LCNC 2.8.2-39. The mobo and memory were brand new at the start of this recent  build.

Perhaps my mistake is expecting it to run for days on end. I'm guessing most people will power down after each session, so perhaps the underlying instability isn't confined to my system but wouldn't make itself widely apparent. Does anyone else actually leave their PCs running for days at a time? Although I will likely be powering down myself once I'm done fiddling, it feels to me that the underlying OS for a machine tool should be reasonably robust - more so than I'm seeing.

I don't need to be actually running LinuxCNC for this problem to show itself. However, it sounds as if the RT kernel is always running, which may be a key difference between the std Mint installation and Mint after LinuxCNC / RT has been installed.

I have a life to live and metal to cut, so perhaps I should leave it there and focus on making stuff now!

I would expect that it should just run. I have had instances of linucCNC running for many months without issue. I have had issues with some kernels and they are very frustrating to debug

You might try another kernel

Could you point me at some info about how I might do that? I'd give it a go but at the moment I wouldn't have a clue where to start, so I'd need to read up on it.

Many thanks

Muzzer wrote:

... Does anyone else actually leave their PCs running for days at a time?

This one i am typing on had a reboot last night, not powered off for more than two months! But not running LinuxCNC, it has a Radeon RX 6900 XT in it so it is mining Ethereum.
PCW is right, try a different kernel, what do you have now?
uname -a

Looks like PREEMPT:

muzzer_linux@LinuxCNC:~$ uname -a
Linux LinuxCNC 4.9.0-13-rt-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.228-1 (2020-07-05) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

What should I try? I seem to recall my first install (also prone to freezing, top of this thread) used RTAI(?)