I'm having trouble with my old ThinkPad 11e, which has an Intel Celeron N2940 processor. It seems to kernel panic with versions newer than 6.11, forcing me to stick with Ubuntu 24. I'm wondering how to diagnose these issues and report them effectively. I typically just roll back the kernel and wait for patches, but since my laptop is old and has this niche CPU, it complicates things. I even tried installing an Arch-based distro to access older kernels with newer packages, but I ran into a problem where no Arch distro will boot— it loops back to the GRUB screen without any error messages. I only found one mention of this issue in a forum that went unanswered.
2 Answers
You might want to look into using `kdump`. It saves the kernel state to memory and then to disk for analysis later. You'll need to install and configure Kdump depending on your distribution. After a crash, you should find a crash dump in `/var/crash` the next time you boot. It’s a bit of a pain to diagnose these kinds of issues, so be prepared for some time spent analyzing the dump. I suspect the panic could be due to OS configuration rather than an actual kernel issue, so you might want to check that too.
First off, does this problem also happen when you're using a live boot mode? I recommend starting with some hardware testing to make sure everything is working properly. That can save you a lot of headaches later.
I just tried doing a mirror of my home directory using a Mint live USB, and it froze a few minutes in. So I guess it looks like a hardware issue.