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
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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?
Oh yes of course lol. I'm a spazz about updating it. After most changes I make, I do an update
Fair. Do you still have Windows installed somewhere?
Nope, haven't used windows in a decade. I have a ventoy drive with isos though of course.
But actually, I may have just cracked the case! I have a dell xps 13 9310 laptop. The thing only comes with TWO ports and theyre both usb c..... and over the last few years of owning this, these ports have been getting looser, more finicky, and more jacked up. So I believe its some sort of power issue finally catching up.
As a matter of fact, I discovered this right now As I was trying to finaggle the charger into the port, my laptop froze up!!! The cable was plugged in, I got the white light on the front of my laptop, indicating it is charging, although the little charging symbol wasn't showing up by the battery applet in the sys tray! It was then that I realized it was just frozen again lol smh this is too much
Aha! We’re getting somewhere!
A quick Google shows that OEM kernel 5.6 has been reported to cause some form of freezing issue.
The reason I asked about Windows is because I wanted to rule out a hardware issue. My thinking was if we didn’t see any freezing in Windows, it was a software issue. If we did, it would point to hardware.
Hmm looks like I have kernel 6.1.10 or something? I did hardware scans through some bios tools and it all scanned fine, but I don't know how accurate those are...
Can you post the output of uname -a?
uname -a 75xx 6.1.0-10-rt-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_RT Debian 6.1.38-2 (2023-07-27) x86_64 GNU/Linux
Gosh idk if that makes sense I'm taking pics of the output on my laptop with my phone and extracting the text, sorry for the ugly format lol
Hmm. Not as enlightening as I’d hoped. Did your laptop come with Debian?
Oh no, it came with windows initially but I never used it. I've had this laptop for like 3 years I believe?
The fact that Thunderbolt is involved makes me wonder if it’s something to do with the Linux kernel not liking Intel’s thunderbolt implementation. At this point I’m reaching the limits of my know-how, so I don’t have much more to suggest
Hey I don't even own a thunderbolt cable, so I can always disable that in my bios. But I'm wondering, is there a specific log I should be looking at that would most likely give me some input? Idk which logs are for what and definitely don't know how to filter and manipulate the output to find what I'm looking for, but always willing to learn
I’m not sure where to find it if there is one
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
Never looked into that log, I shall give it a shot
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.
Not a fan of the design at all... Well obviously now lol think they'll eventually come loose off the motherboard and be useless. They're almost there anyway. Maybe time to start planning for a budget, emergency system
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.
Ahh I gotcha. Its most likely caused by me, NGL. I've been trying to experiment and explore a bit with computing and networking and the likes, so I probably have something conflicting or broken. I mean I've seen plenty of errors using journalctl right after a hard reset so that I could go backward from there, but none of it makes sense. Do you know anything about log analyzers? But then again analyzers can overcomplicate things too ala netdata lol I set that up and holy god I didn't know what I was looking at lol I also have suspicion that mullvad might be playing a role in this. But again its difficult for me to put pieces together with limited knowledge about logs
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?
Ahh so dmesg pretty much only collects info regarding kernel crashes or whatever? Do they usually retain stuff from the prior day or two? I haven't used my laptop much today, so no new crashes
Yes dmesg prints out kernel messages and it resets every boot. So any driver crashes etc should be there. https://superuser.com/questions/565927/differences-in-var-log-syslog-dmesg-messages-log-files
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 :)
Thanks a lot. I have a few assumptions just based off what little I could interpret from the logs.... When I check htop for CPU and ram usage, nothing really stands out as abnormal. Of course whichever browser I'm using is always the most ram hungry program. Now if I just did a reinstall of Debian 12, should that hypothetically fix the issue if it is an OS problem (which I believe it may be)?
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