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Hello,
After a long battle with Windows, my girlfriend decided that she wants to try Linux on her laptop, and so I helped her. With the previous OS, it slowed down to a crawl quickly after logging in, so it was basically useless. With Arch, it is snappier, boots faster and is quicker to open stuff.
Problem is we are now having random lockups that require a hard reboot to fix. This laptop has little discusson on the web, but there are reports of other ASUS laptops having freeze issues too, such as the X552M and X205TA.
These reports generally recommend adding
intel_idle.max_cstate=1to kernel parameters, but it did not fix for us. Others say it's related to power saving features, so I disabled TLP to avoid it. It seems to happen right after we go from idle state to starting a software (notably Chromium).
The hardware is:
Intel i5-5200U
8 GB RAM (it's not an OOM issue)
HD Graphics 5500 + Geforce 930M (the latter is disabled, didn't install bumblebee)
Using kernel 5.3.7-2 with GNOME 3.34.1, up to date system
I already skimmed through dmesg and journalctl and it does not show useful information, it seems that computer freezes before kernel can realize something is wrong so there is no log of failure. Watchdogs are not disabled too, and it's not possible to use magic SysRq after freezing.
Let me know if I need to provide any other information. I am well versed in Linux so I'm comfortable fiddling with the system, if need be.
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Hey,
Did you try stuff like an LTS kernel, running memtests to check on the RAM and so on ?
Did you notice any kind of clear pattern triggering the issue ? From what you wrote "seems to happen right after we go from idle state to starting a software" is it clearly a pattern or does it also fails when completely idleing ?
I don't have much more to add, maybe trying others distros/OS, i have a PC that behave kinda similarly on which only openbsd's ddb can sometimes give me access to ddb when it happens.
Carefully explaining your problem is half the solution.
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@xze using LTS 4.19 seems to have helped it a bit, at least it did not freeze but we haven't used it a lot since. I'll try memtest whenever I can and report back.
It sometimes fails when idling, I did not observe a specific pattern that triggers the issue yet.
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It ended up being a bad motherboard. It got replaced and now it's working.
Should I mark it [SOLVED]? Might be misleading considering it wasn't an Arch issue.
Last edited by Ranieri (2020-04-09 22:25:36)
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