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[SOLVED] System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Hi all,

So I installed Artix (runit) on my laptop ~2 months ago, and now I am having an issue where my entire system will freeze, this includes keyboard and mouse input to the extent I cannot even toggle num-lock on my keyboard, except that sound from whatever programs are running (if any) will continue to play.

When this happens, the only option I have is to power cycle my machine with the power button.

I have gone through various search engines trying to find similar crashes, but all I can really find are crashes where the display only freezes (input still works so those people could still drop to the TTY) and this was due to NVIDIA cards. Given that I am using a combination of Intel integrated graphics and an AMD mobile gpu, I am pretty sure they aren't related.

Before Artix was installed, I was running vanilla Arch, which I never noticed happening in ~18 months of running it. Could this be something that SystemD was catching (and automatically resolving) and thus I didn't notice?

The timing on these crashes seems completely arbitrary.

I first had crashes when playing Dark Crusade through wine (with crashes happening every ~20-40 minutes).

When I started playing the original mass effect through proton via steam, at first crashes happened around ~30-40 minutes in, then I could easily go 3-5 hours without a crash, then a crash would happen, and then not happen again.

I haven't had a crash playing Quake using the quakespasm engine (which is native to Linux) so at I first thought the issue was a wine/proton issue.

Then I experienced a crash watching a video on YT, once in my web browser (Brave) and once through streaming directly to mpv.

So I'm pretty sure that it cannot be a wine/proton issue.

My next thought was that it was a hardware acceleration issue, but last week when I had a zoom meeting for uni, I had another crash, now instead of a webcam, I use my phone with droidcam instead. As far as I am aware, there is no hardware acceleration involved here, the CPU just passes on the video feed is processed by the phone (is this correct?).

Now the crashes have been significantly less random when play StarCraft II's campaign through wine. I have had no crashes except for the missions on Redstone and New Folsom. These levels have texture pallets that are markedly different from most of the rest of the campaign. On those levels only, I'll get crashes every couple of minutes or so.

This leads me to believe that there is some specific library that is getting called, and when it can't be, the system locks up. Am I on track with this? How do I even go about approaching the problem if this is the case?.

I'm getting quite frustrated enough to consider going back to vanilla Arch, but I also feel I haven't at least done my 'due diligence' in at least attempting to solve my problem.

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #1 –
This shouldn't have anything to do with systemd, any init, or even the distro. Unfortunately, this sounds driver-related (freezes while using 3D graphics/rendering). Mesa or the linux kernel itself would be the top culprits here. One relatively easy thing to do would be to see if this occurs on linux-lts. You could also attempt to try different mesa versions and see if that does anything as well.

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #3 –
Thanks for taking the time to reply guys.

Quote from: Dudemanguy – on
This shouldn't have anything to do with systemd, any init, or even the distro. Unfortunately, this sounds driver-related (freezes while using 3D graphics/rendering). Mesa or the linux kernel itself would be the top culprits here. One relatively easy thing to do would be to see if this occurs on linux-lts. You could also attempt to try different mesa versions and see if that does anything as well.

Thanks for the feedback, what you're saying does make sense, the difference in init was the first thing that came to mind as the last 'big change' I've made recently. I'll give swapping out to the lts kernel and get back to you in hopefully a few hours or so.

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #4 –
it's HW problem or DRM/video driver/kernel problem on 99%

lately (on my year old) computer I sometimes have similar problems. It freezes everything except sound, freezes instead of sleeping, or when you wake up.
I suspect the kernel or some peripheral (the external antenna is outside, sometimes it damp and makes a trouble in the kernel). According to kernel observations 5.9 and 5.10.

Certainly is not the reason init. It is not such a powerful tool to cause freezing. 

but I have already noticed bugs in the mesa. You can try the latest mesa-git, if that not help in combination with  5.8 LTS kernel.

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #5 –
So I've rolled back to the LTS 5.4.9 kernel (I think, whatever the current one in the repo is) and it seems to be smooth sailing, except for droidcam only having a dkms module for the latest kernel, which is annoying but can be worked around. I think I'll give it a day or two before calling the issue solved juuuust in case, last thing I want to do is get ahead of myself.

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #6 –
dkms is not annoying, dkms is the best way how keep automatically rebuilded drivers for every kernel  ;) i like dkms a lot

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #7 –
dkms is actually the best way to know, if the modules build fits to your kernel or not, cause either they build properly or you get an error.

Re: System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #8 –
Ok, thanks for all the help guys, I haven't had  a crash in the last couple of days, I guess it was just a driver issue in the kernel. I've marked the thread as solved.

Re: [SOLVED] System Complete Freeze Except for Sound

Reply #9 –
Quote from: Krellnus – on
Ok, thanks for all the help guys, I haven't had  a crash in the last couple of days, I guess it was just a driver issue in the kernel. I've marked the thread as solved.

Nice, keep calm and use dkms ;)