init randomly stops, then reboots after long delay

I’ve never run across this before. On a neighbor’s Intel Sandy Bridge I just zypper dup’d from 42.3 to 15.0 to 15.1. On some boot attempts, init just stops, and after a considerable time, maybe 1-1.5 minutes, or more, it reboots. While stopped, CAD has no effect. Stopping points have included:

  • Starting udev Coldplug all Devices
  • Reached target Basic System
  • Others

When it does complete init, it operates apparently quite normally. It is multiboot with 13.1 and WinXP, neither of which suffer this problem. Is this maybe fallout from CPU vulnerabilities and mitigations that a BIOS update could impact? Any other ideas?

I have a Sandy Bridge laptop.

On some boots, it freezes. I have not waited long enough to see whether it reboots – at that point, I usually power-off and start over.

It does not often freeze – maybe one boot in 10. Exactly where it freezes does vary.

I first noticed this when the laptop was new. I think I was running openSUSE 11.3 at that time. It froze very often back then, so the behavior now is an improvement. And, back then, it froze with the desktop running. Typically, if I left it idle for a while, the screen would dim. And then it would freeze as soon as I did something. It seemed that the freeze was associated with restoring full brightness. So I think it is a graphics bug. I now turn off screen dimming, but I still allow screen blanking for power savings. And I have not seen a freeze on the desktop for a long time. But it does still occasionally freeze during bootup.

Thanks nrickert!

I updated the original v1.10 2012 bios to latest 2018 v2.10, and since, at least 8 straight boots with no pause except waiting for the usual slow-pokey Wicked, which also pauses shutdown/reboot.

BTW, it’s a Z75 Pro3 ASRock with 8GB RAM and i3-2100 CPU. The new BIOS makes POST much faster even though Fast Boot is disabled.

Hi
Set the wait time to 1?


systemd-analyze blame | head -n 2
3.639s mandb.service                                                            
1.043s wicked.service                                                           

cat /etc/sysconfig/network/config |grep WAIT_FOR_INTERFACES
# WAIT_FOR_INTERFACES is a global wait for all mandatory interfaces in
WAIT_FOR_INTERFACES="1"

I knew this, but I spend a lot more time in upgrades than in fresh installs, and forget about it. It was already too late for me to change on the neighbor’s when your reminder arrived, but I emailed him a link to your post. Hopefully it will be clear enough for him to deal with.