Bdtyktl

A couple of months ago, I had been using Ubuntu 16.04 on a Thinkpad T570 for a year or so, when my laptop windowing crashed for the first time. I restarted it, and it went back to normal for a week or so before doing it again. Over the next couple of weeks, it did this a half dozen times. For the next two weeks after that, it was completely stable and didn't freeze once. Last week, it started crashing again.

The symptoms are:

• Side bar disappears


• Components of the top bar disappear


• Top bar itself disappears


• Lose ability to switch windows


• Application windows stop responding or rendering


• May shutdown windowing completely and go to a black screen.

I ran Lenovo's builtin hardware diagnostics, and everything comes back fine. So I decided to try upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 to see if that would solve the issue. I did not do a clean install, but upgraded instead.

In the week since the upgrade, 18.04 has crashed twice. The behavior is very similar to the 16.04 crashes, though the error messages and speed of the crash seem somewhat different.

The error messages from this last crash, which are repeated continuously until I hard shutdown are:

• EXT4-fs error (device nvme0n1p2) ext3_find_entry:1436: inode#[NUMBER]: comm gmain: reading directory lblock 0


• systemd-journald[268]: Failed to write entry ([NUMBER] items [NUMBER] bytes), ignoring: Read-only file system

Other than that, I don't have other concrete data points to help nail down what's going on. But here are a few other thoughts that might be useful:

• As far as I can tell, nothing I'm doing triggers this response. I spend most of my time in Chrome, Pycharm, and the command line. I can be doing anything in any of those (or other applications) when this happens.


• My system is pretty stock. I don't do a lot of tinkering with system settings, and hadn't messed with anything in a while when the first crash happened.


• The reboot after a crash isn't always successful. Sometimes it'll get stuck on the Lenovo logo, sometimes a blank screen, sometimes Ubuntu's logo will appear for a bit before a purple blank screen.


• It seems like waiting longer between shutdown and reboot increases the likelihood that the restart will be successful.

Any thoughts on what might be going on would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Update 1

In repsonse to @heynnema suggestion:

The SMART Data & Tests button is grayed out and cannot be clicked (on any device/partition). I did: sudo apt install smartmontools, after which the SMART Data & Tests button stayed gray. In an attempt to get some relevant information, I then ran sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0n1p2. It doesn't produce any information including "sector", but the output is below:

smartctl 6.6 2016-05-31 r4324 [x86_64-linux-4.15.0-29-generic] (local build)

Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org



=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===

Model Number:                       SAMSUNG MZVLW256HEHP-000L7

Serial Number:                      S35ENX0J599958

Firmware Version:                   4L7QCXB7

PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x144d

IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x002538

Total NVM Capacity:                 256,060,514,304 [256 GB]

Unallocated NVM Capacity:           0

Controller ID:                      2

Number of Namespaces:               1

Namespace 1 Size/Capacity:          256,060,514,304 [256 GB]

Namespace 1 Utilization:            168,824,696,832 [168 GB]

Namespace 1 Formatted LBA Size:     512

Local Time is:                      Thu Feb 28 18:47:38 2019 UTC

Firmware Updates (0x16):            3 Slots, no Reset required

Optional Admin Commands (0x0017):   Security Format Frmw_DL *Other*

Optional NVM Commands (0x001f):     Comp Wr_Unc DS_Mngmt Wr_Zero Sav/Sel_Feat

Warning  Comp. Temp. Threshold:     69 Celsius

Critical Comp. Temp. Threshold:     72 Celsius



Supported Power States

St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat

 0 +     7.60W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0

 1 +     6.00W       -        -    1  1  1  1        0       0

 2 +     5.10W       -        -    2  2  2  2        0       0

 3 -   0.0400W       -        -    3  3  3  3      210    1500

 4 -   0.0050W       -        -    4  4  4  4     2200    6000



Supported LBA Sizes (NSID 0x1)

Id Fmt  Data  Metadt  Rel_Perf

 0 +     512       0         0



=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED



SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02, NSID 0x1)

Critical Warning:                   0x00

Temperature:                        28 Celsius

Available Spare:                    100%

Available Spare Threshold:          10%

Percentage Used:                    1%

Data Units Read:                    3,685,965 [1.88 TB]

Data Units Written:                 8,000,875 [4.09 TB]

Host Read Commands:                 54,265,691

Host Write Commands:                86,676,003

Controller Busy Time:               399

Power Cycles:                       1,823

Power On Hours:                     646

Unsafe Shutdowns:                   93

Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0

Error Information Log Entries:      267

Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0

Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0

Temperature Sensor 1:               28 Celsius

Temperature Sensor 2:               29 Celsius



Error Information (NVMe Log 0x01, max 64 entries)

Num   ErrCount  SQId   CmdId  Status  PELoc          LBA  NSID    VS

  0        267     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

  1        266     0  0x0016  0x4016  0x004            0     1     -

  2        265     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

  3        264     0  0x0016  0x4016  0x004            0     1     -

  4        263     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

  5        262     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

  6        261     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

  7        260     0  0x0026  0x4016  0x004            0     1     -

  8        259     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

  9        258     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

 10        257     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

 11        256     0  0x0016  0x4016  0x004            0     1     -

 12        255     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

 13        254     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

 14        253     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

 15        252     0  0x0008  0x4004      -            0     0     -

... (48 entries not shown)

I also looked at the smartctl man page, but it wasn't obvious which flag(s) might give more information about sectors.

Update 2 (03/05/19)

Even though I've had several crashes in the last few days, ls -al /var/crash doesn't show any crashes in that time frame:

jessime@jessime-t570:~$ ls -al /var/crash

total 59072

drwxrwsrwt  2 root     whoopsie     4096 Mar  5 11:05 .

drwxr-xr-x 15 root     root         4096 Jan 31  2018 ..

-rw-r-----  1 jessime  whoopsie 37795148 Mar  1 10:39 _usr_bin_gedit.1000.crash

-rw-rw-r--  1 jessime  whoopsie        0 Mar  1 10:39 _usr_bin_gedit.1000.upload

-rw-------  1 whoopsie whoopsie        0 Mar  1 10:40 _usr_bin_gedit.1000.uploaded

-rw-r-----  1 jessime  whoopsie 22683033 Feb 27 19:04 _usr_bin_pulseaudio.1000.crash

Lets check your Ubuntu file system first...

• boot to a Ubuntu Live DVD/USB


• open a terminal window


• type sudo fdisk -l
  


• identify the /dev/XXXX device name for your "Linux Filesystem"


• type sudo fsck -f /dev/XXXX # replacing XXXX with the number you found earlier


• repeat the fsck command if there were errors


• type reboot
  

Update #1:

Then lets check the SMART Data...

• open the Disks application


• select SMART Data & Tests from the hamburger icon


• review the data, looking for parameters with "sector" in the name


• take a screenshot and edit it into your question


• run the SMART Tests

Update #2:

I think that you have a SSD firmware problem. See this update, but double-check that I've got the right one for your machine. Both Lenovo and Samsung have updater tools, so do a little homework. Do a backup FIRST, and then do the update. You'll need to run the updater in Windows.