I’m not entirely sure what’s special about my machine (T61 Thinkpad) that makes it lock up and reboot at least once per day without a warning (but sometimes after showing things in blue), but I’ve decided to blame something down the Xorg/Nouveau stack.
Interestingly, SSH’ing onto the sick machine isn’t much help either – when it freezes, cat /proc/kmsg, tail -f /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/messages, or gdb attached to /usr/bin/Xorg and gnome-shell don’t react anymore and don’t show any “additional” output either. Maybe it’s time to try Wayland? Can’t get much worse. :P
OK, I also have a T61 Thinkpad and I had this issue starting with GNOME 3.6. This happened to me regularly and eventually my screen just went completely black, which meant afaik meant that my gpu had died. I switched my hdd to a new Thinkpad T61, and I still have the issue. It happens less frequently, though.
If your T61 has an NVS 140m, it may be the fact that the chip itself is faulty:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T61-and-prior-T-series-ThinkPad/T61-Nvidia-Quadro-NVS-140M-garbled-display-problem/td-p/46469/page/17
Ah thanks for the hints!
Yes, “lspci -v” tells me
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G86M
[Quadro NVS 140M] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Capabilities: [600] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1 Len=024
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
There could be many, many reasons, but my ThinkPad is plagued by this, which could be related:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917081
If it sounds lke your problem, search for “aharoni” to see what solved it.
I’ve seen this with NVIDIA + Nouveau. .When eventually I got closed drivers to work, problem went away.
What Amir says is partly true, I have a t420s and I used to have random kernel panics (which I didn’t since can’t remember when). I am not using nvidia tho, just regular intel graphics card. Blacklisting the mei_me module fixed my issues completely, ymmv