All,
I'm not sure if this will help any of you, but I was running into similar arbitrary crashes on my new NUC as well. I purchased a D54250WYK1 alongside a 2x4GB Crucial memory kit, 120GB Crucial SSD, and Intel's 7260 dual band wireless transceiver. I installed stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on it, and everything seemed to be fine, until I started using an external USB drive from Western Digital (1TB USB 3.0 drive). I bolted that drive up to allow for some automated backups to occur across my network (one of my uses for the new NUC was as a NAS replacement).
In any case, things seemed fine at first. But then suddenly I couldn't get rsync to run consistently across my wireless infrastructure, but it works just fine from an alternate (non-NUC) endpoint with a similar configuration using a legacy Intel motherboard (D525MW). After investigating the system with top, it would fail at an arbitrary point. At first I thought it *had* to be a memory problem. But it wasn't. I also thought that it had to be a USB 3.0 driver or external USB hard drive problem. It wasn't.
My problem ended up being the wireless. I don't yet know if it is a driver issue or a hardware issue, or both. But, when I attach a wired connection and use that instead of the wireless for the network rsync, everything is perfect, and top shows nearly all 8GB of RAM being used just fine, and it's been running like this now for several hours with a long-term rsync loop. I disabled swap for this exercise, to ensure that no swap space issues were getting in the way:
| KiB Mem: 8103624 total, 7962792 used, 140832 free, | 77700 buffers |
| KiB Swap: 16702456 total, | 0 used, 16702456 free. 7180040 cached Mem |
I know you guys seem to be fighting a video problem, but are you absolutely sure you've completely disabled your wireless to see what effect that has? I found I didn't even have to remove the wireless board - in my case I just enabled my wired ethernet and made sure I was using that after checking my IP's with ifconfig. From that point, everything has been perfect. Plan is to run this for another 12-24 hours and check the progress before attempting to further isolate what the heck is wrong with the wireless piece. Isn't clear to me whether it is BIOS (or more interestingly perhaps some conflict in the BIOS) or linux-side driver. But, since this is a relatively new board and since Intel might be still working out BIOS kinks, I think a BIOS issue is the safest bet as to where the problem is most likely to be.
Just thoughts attempting to help - in my case, direct video to an external monitor is a non-issue as I run my system headless, and then I VNC if I need to use the GUI for any particular reason.. although I only do that when I must (web browsing for stuff/etc) as I am typically using a terminal.
Good luck,
Pat