I’ve been having a pretty detrimental issue lately that just started happening recently. My computer will just freeze out of no where but everything continues to run. It will freeze but a youtube video, or song will continue to play, the monitors are still running and I’ll be partially unable to use my mouse and keyboard for very short random amounts of time. I’ll be able to maybe click up or down on my keyboard and the browser Im using will scroll, or the cursor will move but thats all.
I cant do any other actions like focusing another window or clicking on anything, I cant reboot either. Its effectively useless but still is trying to read user input. Just now it happened for the 2nd or 3rd time in the past 3 days. I hit Mod+Enter (shortcut to spawn a terminal) a bunch of times and nothing happened until a few minutes later when my screen started to reflect the change and there were a ton of terminals but I still couldnt type reboot or anything like that. I have a picture of it but it really doesn’t show much, mainly its partially frozen and the mouse would dissappear and the keyboard and mouse stop working along with the visual rendering but like I said its still “running” processes in the background.
The first time it happened I had to use the power button and something went really wrong. I booted back in and it couldn’t find the boot partition, I had to boot in with the back up initramfs option in grub and then run in “mkinitcpio -P” to rebuild the original boot image.
Im not sure what I should do here. Do I need to do a complete back up and reinstall? I’m still fairly new to Linux and I’m not sure how to read all of the logs to diagnose the issue, any advice would be much appreciated.
Can you switch to another tty when the error occurs with Ctrl+Alt+F2 or F3 or F… and is your computer responsive then?
It’s nice that you posted your journal, but I won’t read every line of a couple hours up-time. If you can determine the relevant time frame, please just post that.
In case the problem is coming from Xorg, you should also check the logs in /var/log/ (Usually it’s Xorg.0.log) and in /home/user/.local/share/xorg/
Making a backup of your personal data is always a great idea, because of many reasons. For example, your disk may fail permanently.
You could try reinstalling a few packages, like kernel(s) and their headers, GPU drivers, and some other essential system packages.
If that doesn’t help, the easiest way to deal with this would be re-installing the system.
Tip: if you re-install the system, look for word REISUB in this forum and make your system more fail safe in case you need to forcefully reboot because of various system problems.
No I cant even get to a TTY at all, I’ll try again if and when it happens again. it only partially listens to the keyboard and mouse and ends up just pausing. It doesn’t respond to shortcuts or clicking anything.
Also if you jump to this line “Apr 14 19:11:53 sweets-pc systemd-logind[551]: Power key pressed short.” thats a good reference point. I waited it out last time for some hours and it stayed frozen, so this time I just hit the power button and got it over with after testing some things. You can see right before that there is a bunch of stuff with d-bus and my Keyboard (ducky mecha one) and the kernel, prior to that theres a bunch of rtkit-daemon handing out CPU to a process (I was encoding some very small gifs on a single thread) and DiscordCanary requested the upower service, which idk anything about. That could be an issue.
I dont think it happened further back than this “Apr 14 15:46:49 sweets-pc sudo[131872]: sweet : TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/sweet/dev/img-picker ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/pacman --sync – community/gifsicle”
I dont really see anything in that time frame that screams out to me besides there being a lot of rtkit-daemon and the single upower thing. Idk what Im looking for though either.
Apr 14 19:07:52 sweets-pc kernel: usb 1-4.1: USB disconnect, device number 5
Apr 14 19:07:57 sweets-pc kernel: usb 1-4.1: new full-speed USB device number 12 using xhci_hcd
Apr 14 19:07:57 sweets-pc kernel: usb 1-4.1: New USB device found, idVendor=3233, idProduct=6301, bcdDevice= 0.00
Apr 14 19:07:57 sweets-pc kernel: usb 1-4.1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Apr 14 19:07:57 sweets-pc kernel: usb 1-4.1: Product: Ducky One2 Mini RGB
Did you plug in/reconnect your keyboard there or was that something unintended?
Did you switch your network connection there or plug in an ethernet cable or something like this? That seems to be the last thing that happened before pressing the power button.
Is there some pattern when you have the freeze?
Your UEFI is relatively up to date (07.01.2022) but could you check if there is an update available from the manufacturer. If you have random usb disconnections and network disconnections it could be the mainboard after all.
Of course the reinstalls that @manuel mentioned are worth a try.
Thank you. So no USB issues but I do have some network issues, its been randomly disconnecting from my wifi pretty often, even when my phone is working fine. A system restart generally fixes that issue and it will connect properly for a while. My internet is kind of shitty in the first place and the signal is around 60% from the router, so its not optimal, but even with that I can notice that its acting funny.
I haven’t noticed any patterns really, especially since its only happened the few times, one while I was pretty much asleep. The keyboard was acting up a little bit, so I did unplug it and replug it back in when it froze. I might just do a backup and reinstall to see if that helps and then keep an eye out for what conditions are causing it. I appreciate the help
If you are on it and make a backup anyways, maybe you want to consider also updating your UEFI/BIOS. Description on how to do that and software are available through the manufacturer: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z590-PRO-WIFI/support#bios