Arch Linux

Lights_A5

Member

Registered: 2017-09-15

Posts: 6

Computer Stutters than freezes... clocksource problem?

So for a year I've been trying to diagnose a problem I've been having and I have even come here asking for help. Nothing worked and I couldn't pinpoint the error. However, I think I have something now.

Here's a brief overview. At some point my system starts having some serious stutters then stops completely. It happens seemingly at random. It has happened at 5 minutes uptime and happened 5 hours uptime. Journalctl shows nothing. I even tried various Linux distros with different DEs and nothing worked.

For some reason I never tried dmesg until now. I tailed dmesg and went on my way. 3 hours later the stutters start happening and I immediately switch over to the terminal that was tailing it. There were some weird errors:

[b]clocksource: timepkeeping watchdog on CPU14: Marking clocksource 'tsc' as unstable because the skew is too large:[/b]
[b]clocksource: 'hpet' wd_now: 2db4f747 wd_last: 2cf73858 mask: ffffffff[/b]
[b]clocksource: 'tsc' sc_now: 200fd059d288 cs_last: 200f5957e24c mask: ffffffffffffffff[/b]
tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog
[b]TSC found unstable after boot, most likely due to broken BIOS. Use 'tsc-unstable'.[/b]
sched_clock: Marking unstable (11751910691481, 113204920)<-(11752129888380, -105958461)
clocksource: Switched to clocksource hpet
INFO: NMI handler (perf_event_nmi_handler) took too long to run: 153.342 msecs
perf: interrupt took too long (1199404 > 2500), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 300
INFO: NMI handler (perf_event_nmi_handler) took too long to run 189.779 msecs

At this point it's completely frozen.

I'm not familiar with what all this means and doing some google searches just gives me pastebins and info about clocksources from Intel. Can someone please help me? Here is my setup:

Processor: Ryzen 7 1700
Motherboard: ASUS X370  (latest BIOS update)
Graphics card: RX480 with amdgpu driver

Just as a note, this problem doesn't come up with Windows so I don't think my hardware is necessarily defective.

paulkerry

Member

From: Sheffield, UK

Registered: 2014-10-02

Posts: 611

Re: Computer Stutters than freezes... clocksource problem?

If you want to change your clocksource, you can see what you are currently using after booting with...

cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource

then see what clocksources are available on your system with...

cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource

and then testing by changing the kernel boot line by inserting/appending with something like this for instance...

clocksource=hpet

If that is stable, change your bootloader.

Good luck!
Cheers
Paul.

edit: in some bios setups I've come across, you have to specifically enable HPET to enable it on the command line.
also this older topic has some info: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=208321

Last edited by paulkerry (2018-10-24 19:36:12)