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I have recently updated my Arch Linux machine. Since then, I have been getting kernel panics here and there. (the screen freezes and the status lights on my keyboard are blinking)

It seems to happen when I watch a YouTube video for around 10 minutes. I want to find out what is causing these kernel panics so that I may solve them.

I can't seem to find any kind of log file with any kind of valuable information.

journalctl gives no useful information and dmesg only shows information about the current running kernel. Most of the log files in /var/log/ are empty. I think this is normal since systemd handles logging and doesn't store the logs there.

Where can I find more information about the kernel panics I'm getting? I don't need a full kernel dump, A stack trace or the name of the module/subsystem at fault should be enough.

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3 Answers 3

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dmesg -w > yourlogfile &

The above command will follow the dmesg log and print it to a file. Let it run until the kernel panics and check the log after booting with

tail yourlogfile

It may not give you the smoking gun, but it is a place to start.

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If the system is completely borked, then there is no guarantee that the error could be written to disk.

But since the screen locks too, it seems possible that the error is X-related. X still has its own log files, so start by looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old (or perhaps one of the other /var/log/Xorg.* files) after a crash.

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I think that you should configure kdump for your machine so that whenever a panic occurs you will get a vmcore (vmcore is a snapshot of the running kernel at the time when panic occurred).

Please follow below steps to configure a kdump kernel :

configuring kdump - Link1

configuring kdump - Link2

To check the generated core files you need to use crash utility

[Update]

Some kernel parameters (search sysctl parameters)may also required to be configured.

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