Shutdown while gaming

[Bismuth]

How to monitor Ubuntu with logs before crash and shutdown of computer ? I wish to study why my computer which is shutdown while gaming after some minutes. In order to find a fix, I need to get logs and value as temperature and cpu %. Can you help me ? The only game which poweroff my computer is Nine parchents (steam play).

[Condex]

Here goes an idea, but maybe someone can offer you a better solution...

I think that you can use MangoHUD[github.com] to log the statistics of your playthrough, but I'm not sure if it logs CPU usages and temperatures.
In any case, if MangoHud works with the game you mention, you can see the realtime statistics whilst playing (I've used MangoHUD with No Man's Sky, for example).

[SIGKILL]

There's a nice tool called sensord included in the Arch lm-sensors package which starts a sensor logging daemon, which outputs temp sensors to the system log. It looks like it used to be in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but ofc I'm not seeing it in 20.04...

Check your system journal with

journalctl -b -1

after a crash. look at the end to see if there were any errors being thrown that might shed light on your issue.

Maybe sensord is just undocumented in Ubuntu now or you can find it in a PPA, but with that enabled it can add temperature logging to your journal such that you can use the above command to review it after a crash.

The psensor package has a gui line graph to watch it in real-time, as well as generate logs (if you can read them, lol)

Another easy one-liner is

watch -n10 sensors | tee -a ~/last_temps.log

keep it running while gaming, and cat the file after a reboot to see the last temps it polled.

[Zyro]

I'd recommend to look at psensors after a minute of gaming and alt-tabbing out.
A, and i very much recommend cleaning the interiors of your PC if it's a desktop.
A GPU has died for me not doing that.
(Text in German, but images say something already...
https://ein-eike.de/2013/03/29/staublunge/ )

[Bismuth]

Originally posted by Condex:

Here goes an idea, but maybe someone can offer you a better solution...

I think that you can use MangoHUD[github.com] to log the statistics of your playthrough, but I'm not sure if it logs CPU usages and temperatures.
In any case, if MangoHud works with the game you mention, you can see the realtime statistics whilst playing (I've used MangoHUD with No Man's Sky, for example).

Thanks! I tested with success. Now, I can monitor temperature before poweroff.

I will analysis your others suggests.

[Marlock]

After you figure out what's causing the crashing, this thread may be of interest for monitoring and even tweaking a couple things:

GUI tools for monitoring and managing clock/voltage/temp/fans on Linux
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1777136225015918222/

Also, regarding possible causes for the crashes, I'd advise you to have a look at PSU voltages for unexpected drops, especially on 12V rails and especially if the PSU is already getting old... some MoBos show voltages on their Bios and some also shoe that data on "sensors" via the terminal so you may be able to monitor that same as the temps, depending on the model.

[Bismuth]

With your helps of all of you, I identify the root cause. The speed of cpu fan is not full speed when cpu high, so temperature is high and power off. Because I use the TLP application for improve power management of laptop.

[SIGKILL]

If your LPCIO is supported, you can use pwmconfig to take software control and rescale the fan throttling, or set it to a max / arbitrary value as needed.

Super handy for laptops that are always trying to melt themselves down.