I suspect there’s a bug in Ubuntu’s default whole disk encryption setup.
Here’s what happens, repeatably:
- I make a fresh install, Ubuntu 15.10 with whole disk encryption, overwriting the whole disk
- It boots and seems to work just fine
- A few reboots later, programs start crashing. “Ubuntu has experienced an internal error”, Firefox will crash immediately on startup, etc.
- Finally, after an additional reboot or two, it will boot to busybox. Running fsck finds and fixes tons of errors.
- Go to step 2
Not cool.
Conclusions so far:
- I’m quite sure it’s not disk failure. I reproduced this from scratch with two different drives. In both cases, the SMART data looks healthy, and running self tests thru gnome-disks comes up clean.
Beyond that… I have no idea.
Details:
- System76 Galago Ultrapro
- 64-bit desktop Ubuntu 15.10
- Kernel 4.2.0-18-generic
- Default Ubuntu whole-disk encryption setup: ext2 boot partition, dm-crypt+LUKS+ext4 main partition.
- I ran into this first with a 256GB Samsung 840 EVO, then reproduced it on a 512GB Samsung 830. I got the same problems in both cases: works fine for a while, but becomes unusable after a few reboots. Installing Ubuntu without disk encryption works.
Has this happened to anyone else?
I’ve checked the syslog and couldn’t find anything incriminating.
Does anyone know how I could figure out what’s going on here?