How to debug blender freezing the whole computer?

Question

I am trying to use Blender on a laptop with the following specs:

• Intel Xeon E3-1200
• HD Graphics 520
• 16 GB RAM
• Debian (linux) OS

I don't expect it working fast nor handling big scenes (I'm just starting to learn), but that seems above the requirements. Despite that, I am observing Blender freezing the whole computer every 15-30min. When it freezes, it often flickers with the previous frame or two of what was shown in blender.

I don't see a correlation between what I'm doing and when it crashes: I saw it crash both when using Eevee and Cycles, doing heavy stuff (generating fire) or duplicating a small mesh or increasing the size of the brush.

I looked at things like RAM, CPU usage, and free space on disk, but all seemed fine. I also looked at the forums didn't find any solution. I tried using both 2.93.1 (downloaded as a binary from blender page) and 2.83.1 from the repo.

I ran blender with --debug-all and --verbose 1 but the generated logs didn't tell me much. Here are the logs: debug, verbose, glxinfo.

How can I debug this issue further?

Answer 1

There are some Debug files that when run just print logs/errors/etc into some text files.

Go to your blender's directory:

C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.93

(or whatever it is)

These should be located there:

blender_debug_log.cmd

blender_debug_gpu.cmd

blender_debug_gpu_glitchworkaround.cmd

Open them and Blender starts by showing a prompt to you that opens Blender's environment just after pressing a key.

Blender now saves a log file in your temp folder after your exit/crash

C:\Users\ username \AppData\Local\Temp\blender\debug_logs

I hope these help.