5.7.7 kernel was still unstable, so was 5.8rc3, but at least with the latter it logged some information that showed some memory allocations failed with the contiguous memory allocater, a new feature recently introduced into the Linux kernel.

     I am building a new kernel with that disabled, it really isn’t required since there are no huge streaming I/O devices like video that might require it and most everything can DMA through the MMU on this particular machine (which can map disparate memory regions into contiguous memory).  If it does not spontaneously boot into the new kernel, I will boot it this evening.

     There is also the possibility of hardware errors but so far it has not logged any.

     Iglulik spontaneously rebooted again tonight, this time on 5.7.7 it made it four days between spontaneous boots but this time I discovered what triggered it so I’ve got a bug report files with bugzilla.kernel.org and I’m going to give 5.8pre4 a try if it proves semi-stable on my workstation.  I normally avoid pre-release kernels but 5.7 has been buggy and so far 5.8pre3 has been totally stable on my workstation.

     One of our servers has been unstable on 5.7.6 and rebooted spontaneously twice in the last few days.  Oddly, only this server seems to be impacted but it is a newer CPU than the others so it may be a kernel problem specific to this CPU.

     I am going to reboot into 5.7.7 tonight IF it hasn’t spontaneously booted into it on it’s own between now and then.  This will happen just after midnight.

     This machine services the web, /home directories, and several shell servers.  Because basically everything relies on /home, everything will be briefly interrupted shortly after midnight except virtual private servers which will not be affected.

     If you are not on Mint, Debian, or Ubuntu, you should just see things lock up briefly, if you are on one of these servers you will be disconnected and will need to re-establish your connection after the boot completes.