It looks like for some reason systemd sending SIGTERM and shutting down my computer. It’s been couple of times this week alone. I am curious if anybody experience the same issue. Here is the logs just before shutdown:
That “zram0: detected capacity change from 16777216 to 0” looks suspicious… RAM issues ? Did you do memtest to check memory ?
Yes, just did it and it passed. Thanks for suggestion though, I didn’t know this tool exist.
Does the system shut down when not connected to a network? University environments often have pranksters who get kicks out of breaking into other student’s PC’s and shutting them off.
Is the system running on battery when shutdowns occur? Laptops with well-aged batteries may shutdown at random seeming times when a spike in power demand meets high internal resistance and voltage drops below a threshold. If your battery is old, you can generate a power spike to see if it causes a shutdown.
Interesting. First two shutdown happened at my home and the last one was at university. I don’t know if any admin can shutdown my laptop, I mean sure they can deauthenticate me but shutting down? Is this even possible?
My laptop isn’t even two years old so i don’t think it’s a battery problem. But not sure though, I will try to test it as you suggest. Any tools/method to generate power spike? Thanks.
Check the logs just before the system shutdown.
It could be UPower taking action if your battery is critically low. I had once a battery that drops from 50 to 0 instantly, triggering UPower’s critical action. But I think it is unlikely in your case since it also generates a notification.
This is normal during shutdown.
Measure, don’t assume. It is not unusual to encounter a batch of bad batteries, and usage patterns have a major impact.
Linux has upower and acpi to display battery status. Use upower --help to see the options. acpi -bi should show original and current battery capacity.
Internet searches for you model and build year may tell you if there are widespread battery issues. Some vendors (e.g., Dell) provide system test tools that cover laptop batteries but may assume you are running Windows.
As for a power spike, play audio at high volume while screen is at maximum brightness, run heavy graphics applications (games, 3-D graphics tests like glmark2) and computational benchmarks such as phoronix-test-suite benchmark stress-ng. You should hear the fan ramp up if the system doesn’t crash.