(Updated, 2020 Jun) Prevent Debian Linux randomly reboot on Biostar NM70I-847

Disclaimer: The article here is provided “as is” without any warranties. The article may not suit your situation. Use at your own risk.


I have a NM70I-847 motherboard, and I installed Debian 9 Stretch on it recently. After installation, the system began to reboot randomly without any warning.

I used to run Debian 7 Wheezy on this motherboard, the RC6 sleep feature of the CPU’s graphics need to be disabled to prevent such issue. It should be very easy to fix just need to add parameter i915.i915_enable_rc6=0to grub boot option.

But the method seems not working (or deprecated) — after applied the fix computer still keep rebooting on its own. Message like the following can be observed from dmesg:

i915: unknown parameter 'i915_enable_rc6' ignored

Yep, that’s why this fix is not working, because this parameter has been ignored by system.

After some digging around, I found there is a parameter which controls RC6 of the graphics located in “/sys/module/i915/parameters/enable_rc6”. The value of “enable_rc6” is -1 and it is read-only. So, I need to create a modprobe configuration file in /etc/modprobe.d to pass the value to system.

Example of the configuration file:

options i915 enable_rc6=0

Reboot, the system is running smoothly without random reboot anymore. And value of /sys/module/i915/parameters/enable_rc6 is 0 now.

After applied the modprobe configuration, such message Setting dangerous option enable_rc6 - tainting kernel can be observed in dmesg, it’s safe to ignore it.

Cheers!


Update on 2020 June:Upgraded to Debian 10 recently, and seems the enable_rc6 option is removed.

After looking around, I found a page related to this issue, suggest you can use  i915.enable_dc=0 to disable the GPU power management and intel_idle.max_cstate=1 to limit the processors sleep states.

I have added both options to /etc/default/grub on my machine. Looks good so far.

Reference: https://linuxreviews.org/Intel_graphics#Kernel_Parameters

2 thoughts on “(Updated, 2020 Jun) Prevent Debian Linux randomly reboot on Biostar NM70I-847”

  1. Hi, I have the same problem as you had, but the option enable_rc6 has disappeared. Do you have a more recent fix? Thanks in advance.

    1. Hello, sorry about the delayed reply.

      After upgraded to Debian 10, seems the enable_rc6 option is removed.
      After looking around, I found there is a page related to this issue suggests you can use i915.enable_dc=0 to disable the GPU power management and intel_idle.max_cstate=1 to limit the processors sleep states. (https://linuxreviews.org/Intel_graphics#Kernel_Parameters)
      I have added both options to /etc/default/grub on my machine. Looks good so far.

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