Arch Linux

mzzzzb

Member

Registered: 2015-11-24

Posts: 9

[SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

Over past few weeks I have faced random crashes during voice calls. The machine just freezes, few seconds of audio keeps looping, does not respond to mouse, keyboard and cannot switch terminals or ssh. The only way to recover is to hard reboot by pressing the power button.
Here are a few observations:
- I have faced this while making voice calls in skype (new skypeforlinux-bin), telegram (telegram-desktop-bin), facebook messgener (in firefox) and viber
- I have always had firefox, dropbox, telegram and possibly skype and viber open when this happened. I use i3 with lightdm
- The system is perfectly stable otherwise, no problems while playing youtube videos in browsers, vlc.
- These are audio related packages installed : alsa, pulseaudio, jack. none of which are recently installed. My machine is Dell latitude E6410, i915 Intel HD Audio No pending package updates.
- I can see a --Reboot-- line in journalctl but nothing significant before that
- last few files modified during time of crash in /var/log are wtmp ~5MB, faillog ~32k, btmp ~1k but these seem to be corrupt, possibly because of hard reboot

I do not know where to start to debug this issue. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Last edited by mzzzzb (2017-07-01 06:14:21)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,787

Re: [SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

Do you have powersaving on snd-hda-intel module enabled (via modprobe.d, or the corresponding setting in TLP/powertop/laptop-mode-tools/whatever)? Try to disable that part that activates power saving on the snd-hda-intel module. that can tend to lead to crashes when it suddenly has to kick out of powersaving mode

mzzzzb

Member

Registered: 2015-11-24

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

Thanks for the hint.

I checked modprobe according to https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Po … ment#Audio
/etc/modprobe.d folder is empty. So I assume its not that.

tlp-stat returns

+++ Audio
/sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save            = 1
/sys/module/snd_hda_intel/parameters/power_save_controller = Y

I am turning this off and see if it helps. I will also make note if I am on battery or ac when this happens next time.

The crash does not happen immediately when I start a call but randomly several seconds or minutes into it, so I cant say for sure if the problem is resolved or not.

--EDIT.
it seems the tlp services were not running, so I am skeptical that this fix would help. Any more suggestions?

+++ TLP Status
State          = enabled
Last run       = 07:25:44 AM,   1210 sec(s) ago
Mode           = battery
Power source   = battery

Notice: tlp.service is not enabled -- invoke "systemctl enable tlp.service" to correct this!
Notice: tlp-sleep.service is not enabled -- invoke "systemctl enable tlp-sleep.service" to correct this!
Notice: systemd-rfkill.service is not masked -- invoke "systemctl mask systemd-rfkill.service" to correct this!

Last edited by mzzzzb (2017-06-17 02:33:31)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 51,684

Re: [SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

Never guess if you can ask ;-)

systool -vm snd-hda-intel

Looping audio is a 99.9% indicator of a kernel crash, so
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Sysrq

Also your sounds setup sounds fairly complex - do you get this behavior on "naked" ALSA as well?

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V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,787

Re: [SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

tlp-stat does a runtime check, it doesn't care about the setting within the config / or the activeness of the service files either. if it tells you Y and 1 on these parameters they are active. If it isn't TLP that activates these, you might have persisted a powertop config somewhere or similar

Last edited by V1del (2017-06-17 21:30:10)

mzzzzb

Member

Registered: 2015-11-24

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

@V1del
I have turned off powersaving for audio. lets see if this does it.

@seth
i just confirmed with systool that power saving has been turned off for snd_hda_intel.

thank you for pointing to sysrq, will try next time machine freezes. I believe i should do a 'c' - Will perform a kexec reboot in order to take a crashdump. Can you suggest anything else that would be helpful ?

i think I only installed pulseaudio explicitly all other packages were installed as dependencies of other packages. This configuration has been stable for sometime now. Its only happening since a week or so ago.

Thank you guys.

Last edited by mzzzzb (2017-06-18 16:57:10)

mzzzzb

Member

Registered: 2015-11-24

Posts: 9

Re: [SOLVED] Troubleshooting crashing archlinux during voice calls

After turning off power saving and couple of updates, the problem is gone. I dont know what in particular fixed it.
Thanks for all the suggestions.