2y ago

My Debian 12 all of a sudden started freezing up on me. any kind folks that can help troubleshoot?

Its the strangest thing, as it just started recently. I'm honestly not sure if it freezes or my touchpad somehow gets disabled. I'm wondering that because most of the time it happens, my dell xps laptop isn't under any sort of heavy load. Its strange. Idk know where to start or what commands would help you guys help me?

I've spent hours before trying to make sense of logs lol but I just don't quite understand the info. Its gotta be some sort of conflicting software or something. I'm always trying new things, so I take full blame for this issue most likely lol. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

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Try to switch to a TTY using Ctrl+Alt and one of the function keys. If you get a text ogin prompt on a black background, that tells us the system is still responsive. If none of the function keys work, we may be dealing with a full freeze
- Nope, Nada. I've tried every key combo I could think of, which really isn't a lot lol but none responded. I used to be able to break the mouse free with I believe ctl + alt + f1 but couldn't do anything except move it around. Couldn't click on anything and couldn't bring up a terminal via CTL alt t. So idk what's going on smh....I think it could be a multitude of things
  
  Oooooooof. Okay, let’s start from the basics then. System up to date?
  
  my pc was freezing some time ago, and after i restart it to unfreeze i run journald -b-1 to see the logs from the last boot
I had this problem with a 1st-gen Ryzen system where the CPU would lock up when it was idle. It turned out to be a bug in the handling of P-states (CPU power states) and the solution was to disable a certain P-state in the BIOS (I forget which).
Later on there was a BIOS update for the motherboard which added a separate option that fixed this issue without having to disable the low power P-states.
These kind of issues can be a real pain to diagnose and your best bet is to search for other people who have had the same problem with the same hardware. There is no way I would have figured out the cause on my own without finding posts elsewhere on the internet about the same issue. Installing any available BIOS updates may be the answer if it's a known hardware issue.
- Yes I think its power related due to the loose and/or possibly damaged USB c ports which are part of the motherboard of course... No cheap fix there. This laptop has been on a slow decline. If I just reinstalled Debian or any other distro, would it fix the issue or is it more likely a system issue that will follow me regardless?
  
  Exactly the reason I think my next laptop is going to be one where repairability is a primary feature.
- I need to look into how to do that. So I'm using 12.1, you think downgrading back 12 should work?
Try booting from the live iso with a USB drive
- And then what?
  
  See if you can replicate the problem. You're trying to see if it's specific to your OS install, or if it's something more ingrained.
- Do you know which kernel versions are affected by this? My kernel version is 5.19.0, so I hope I'm fine? I haven't noticed anything weird thus far.
- Ahh I am running Intel drivers
So you can't switch to TTY with ctrl + alt + f1 (or f2, f3, f4) ?
You could try booting from live usb and check previous dmesg logs (/var/log/dmesg.0 or something, I think)
You could try to narrow the issue by trying to plug in other keyboard or mouse and check if that works.
If not, then probably not a touchpad/keyboard driver issue.
Are the crashes random? Could it be the system crashes when it's going to sleep/wake up after the system is idle?
I'll try to think something else when my hangover passes... :D
- Uhmm for the most part its random. It was much less frequent the other day but not it's happening more and more. And yup, tried all the CTL alt f1-all of them lol like I'm aware logs will probably give the best insight but I don't know much about which log and what it all means plus they're long as fuck. Maybe I should look into log analyzers?
  
  The dmesg logs show boot logs also from previous boots. It has timestamps. After a system freeze, try to reboot and issue sudo dmesg -T and look for the timestamp near the time of crash, is there anything suspicious?
  
  Just throwing another suggestion to look for, maybe check your RAM usage? When I was first trying Linux i was using a persistent live iso, and it would randomly lock up like you describe. Just about the only functionality I had was to REISUB lol. It turned out my OOM services weren't closing programs until it was too late ... or maybe it was trying to put memory into swap space that didn't exist. Who knows. Try opening firefox a bunch of times and maybe see what happens
  This type of thing shouldn't happen with a normal setup though.
  I hope you can figure it out :)
Right in the middle of a freeze right now, but the cursor still moves and the sound went muted. I'm pretty sure I saw errors before regarding pipe wire, pulseaudio, and I think another related program

38 comments