In an attempt to debug system instability and frequent crashes on my NixOS home server, I have enabled boot.crashDump. I am trying this solution because I am unable to find the cause of my crashes through journalctl.
I expect my system to reboot after a crash, with the NMI watchdog enabled and I should be able to access the crash logs at /proc/vmcore as per the option documentation.
The actual result I am seeing involves my computer being on but not accessible in any way. Nothing shows up on displays and the caps lock key on my keyboard does not light up. Additionally, my computer gets very hot while in this state. I can’t be sure of the actual temperatures but the case gets quite hot to the touch.
Through some research, I came to the assumption that my system enters a soft lockup upon crashing, but I am not sure how this could happen as softlockup_panic=1 is being passed as a kernel param.
Any help would be appreciated! Below I’ll list my system information as it might be useful in troubleshooting. Thanks!
Kernel version: 6.12.17
NixOS version: 25.05.20250305.d69ab0d (Warbler)
Hardware: HP EliteDesk 800 g4 mini