Having found the available information on system analysis rather sparse and/or written in such a fashion that is hardly of any use but to the people who wrote the actual documents,I have decided to write a series of articles on Linux system analysis.

When I say crash, it simply means that the whole system freezes and does not respond to any keyboard or mouse input. There are many reasons that can cause Ubuntu to crash. It could be due to hardware incompatibility (especially ATI/Nvidia graphics cards), a software conflict or when you run too many memory intensive applications at the same time.

Mozilla has confirmed a crash bug in the latest Firefox 3.5.1 related to how its JavaScript handle certain long Unicode strings that could lead to a crash on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

The Linux Kernel offers you something that allows you to recover your system from a crash or at the least lets you to perform a proper shutdown using the Magic SysRq Keys. The magic SysRq key is a select key combination in the Linux kernel which allows the user to perform various low level commands regardless of the system’s state using the SysRq key.

Today, Mozilla is happy to release Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox, used by nearly 400 million people around the world to browse the Web. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.

Developers of the Linux kernel have patched a bug that allowed attackers to remotely crash a machine by sending it malicious Wi-Fi signals

Memory leaks and memory corruptions are problems that can be easily introduced in code written in C or C++ and generally in any programming language that does not have a garbage collector built in, causing system crashes and sometimes, even worse, unexpected behavior, creating bugs that are difficult to be detected.

This installment will touch on how user space can interact with Ftrace, faster ways of stopping the trace, debugging a crash, and finding what kernel functions are the biggest stack hogs.

Over the past few years more of the Linux graphics stack has moved within the Linux kernel so that there is finally a proper kernel memory management solution for the open-source graphics drivers and to also provide kernel mode-setting.