I've attached the dmesg output from a system running Debian kernel 3.14.13 which locked up. Everything which needed to write to disk was blocked. The dmesg output didn't catch the first messages which had scrolled out of the buffer. As the disk wasn't writable there was nothing useful in /var/log/kern.log . As an aside one reason for using tmpfs for /tmp is that when the root filesystem has a problem bash filename completion still works. I lost a precious root shell on that system because I pressed TAB and bash hung. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/