Hi All. I’m having an issue that I am hoping I can get some help with.

I have been using linux on this particular laptop for over a year now, and for the past 6 or so months (right around the time I upgraded to Plasma 6, but I think it is just a coincidence) about 50% of the time, when I update all my packages via package manager, the whole system freezes. Like, hard freezes. Waiting any amount of time won’t get me out of it. I have to hold the power button to power it down. I can’t use ctrl+alt+F3 or whatever to get another TTY. Mouse doesn’t move. Nothing works.

It originally happened with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on btrfs. I thought maybe it was btrfs, so I reinstalled with ext4. Same issue. I tried Manjaro. Same issue. I tried EndeavourOS (wasn’t really expecting different behavior at this point). Same issue.

Now I am thinking, what could cause an issue like this? Well, a package manager update just is a ton of file I/O operations, right? Could I have bad RAM and that is getting written to disk? Well, I did a memtest today and it came back perfect. So now I’m thinking it might be the SSD, but I’m not even sure how to check that.

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on or what I should do to fix it or debug it?

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    11 months ago

    I have the same problem with an older macbook air and linux, and I bought a new SSD for it (will be here at the end of the month, since it’s a special pre-ssd model). Husband, who’s an engineer, said that such hard freezes are usually the ssd’s fault, and not the memory’s (he said memory creates other kinds of crashes, but not this kind of hard freeze).

    • Dandroid@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      Well, I just reinstalled on a new SSD this morning. Fingers crossed it all works out! It usually takes a few weeks for the issues to start happening each time, so I guess I’ll just wait in agony until then. 🥲

  • forbiddenlake@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    What hardware? And can you narrow down when during updates?

    I had this problem on Arch on a 5 year old Lenovo laptop with an Nvidia 1660ti GPU. With judicious use of set -x I narrowed it down to systemd daemon-reload.

    I actually changed my ext4 journal mode and added a pacman hook in that calls sync before any systemd hooks ran, after the second time half of the package updates got lost due to the freeze.

    Because the problem only happened most times, and usually not soon after a reboot, I can’t prove it, but the problem hasn’t reoccurred since I switched the Nvidia driver to the open flavor.

    • Dandroid@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      It’s a 2021 Asus Zephyrus G15 with an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU. I got an aftermarket SSD off of Amazon so I could dual boot with Windows, but I haven’t booted back into Windows a single time since installing Linux. Though that might be a good test.

      I can try set -x once I reinstall my distro and get it back up and running tomorrow, as it is currently borked. Since zypper does all the downloads then all of the installs, I was able to see that it always happened during the install phase, not the download phase.

      I am definitely interested in the possibility of it being related to the proprietary Nvidia driver. When it happened yesterday, the proprietary Nvidia driver was being updated (not sure at that exact time. But it was in the list of packages to be updated). I’ll keep an eye on that for sure.

      • SilverCode@lemm.ee
        2·
        11 months ago

        I had a similar problem with hard lockups especially when doing package updates (Arch). After seeing a report on Gaming on Linux about the Nvidia 550 driver (I think it was that one) causing freezes, I uninstalled it and just ran on the intel igpu. Never had a single freeze again. Waited for 555 driver, installed that, and immediately got lockups during package updates (and randomly sometimes) again. I’ve now installed the nvidia-open package to see if it fixes it, and so far so good.

        • Dandroid@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          11 months ago

          Well, I reinstalled this morning and I’m keeping the nouveau driver this time instead of going with the proprietary. I don’t play play games on this laptop anymore since I set up sunshine/moonlight, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

  • seaQueue@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 months ago

    Try firing up btop in a terminal before you kick off an update in another, that should give you a better indication of what’s happening when the system hangs. Turn on kernel “show kernel threads” so you can spot anything kernel side eating CPU.

    Check your kernel journal from the last boot after a freeze, there should be some indication of what went wrong before you rebooted the machine. journalctl -k -b -1 will show you what was going on with the kernel before the machine froze.

    Edit: things to watch for in btop: CPU pegged at 100% and no disk activity? Look at the top process, there’s your offender. Super high IO latency but otherwise the system looks normal? Try another drive. Memory completely used and swap endlessly thrashing? Find something to kill to make more memory available.

    Turn on “show kernel threads” in btop, they’re off by default, so you can see if something in the kernel is eating CPU time.

    • Dandroid@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      I will try this once I get my system back up and running tomorrow! I’m going to install the distro on a new SSD and see what happens.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        I made a couple of edits above re: btop and troubleshooting, if you’re not used to diagnosing hardware and kernel issues they might help