Arch Linux

scippie

Member

Registered: 2019-06-07

Posts: 168

[SOLVED] BTO laptop hangs regularly and can't put my finger on it

I have been using this BTO laptop for some time now. It came with a Windows installation which I kept on there and boot around every two months to update it (and I have no issues with it but as I mentioned, I don't really use it), but I have been running Arch on it for quite a while now (2 years?). I have been using Arch for 7 years on other devices. My desktop PC never has any issues with it.

From the start, I had this sudden hangs of the system. The CAPS LOCK light would start blinking and I could only turn it off the hard way (long pressing the power button). I did set up the kernel SYSRQ keys but they don't work at that point. I guess it's a triple fault, but I don't know.

Sometimes, this happens after the screen goes blank (because of inactivity) and I try to wake it up. The screen sometimes doesn't wake up. If I then do the SYSRQ-S and B thing I think it worked (not quite sure anymore), but if I press the power button to make it shut down the normal way, it ends up in the same hang I described.

When I look into the dmesg after it, there are never any notable things about this hang. Usually everything looks just fine.
So I started trying to figure out what might trigger it, and I think, but I am not at all certain, that it never happens as long as I have never switched to battery (to move to a different room for example). It is just a feeling that it has to do with that, but I am not certain.

Short specs: Intel i7 with integrated GPU (which I use), 32GB, nvidia GeForce RTX 3070M (which I use with prime from time to time).
Have been running on: qtile X11, qtile Wayland (but that gave buggy graphics), and KDE X11 (KDE Wayland gives the same buggy graphics)

Oh, and I did a memtestx86 and there were no errors!

Do you have any tips in how to find out what is going on?
Do you need any extra information?

Any help is appreciated!

Update: it is usually triggered by powering down the system, or, and this is a really irritating one, when doing a pacman install. I think it then happens during the mkinitcpio phase because to repair my system afterwards, I usually have to run mkinitcpio -P to make the system bootable again. I always clean up and reinstall the packages it had been installing first if possible.

Last edited by scippie (2024-06-27 12:45:56)

scippie

Member

Registered: 2019-06-07

Posts: 168

Re: [SOLVED] BTO laptop hangs regularly and can't put my finger on it

Today, I am realizing something. I used to have similar problems with my previous laptop. Actually, it got replaced by this one because of these kinds of issues.
But... the disks have been moved to this laptop and now I am starting to wonder if there is anything actually broken on one of my disks which make my system freeze on a hardware level.

Is there any way I can find that out? Writing debug info about this into a log file is not really an option in this case I think.

Update: did an exteded S.M.A.R.T. test, but as expected: no issues.
But I am thinking of a deeper hardware problem that S.M.A.R.T. will not find (no conveyance test support on my SSD it seems).

My only option seems to be simply replacing the M2.SSD and hoping for the best? Not looking forward to that.

Last edited by scippie (2024-06-26 10:46:28)

scippie

Member

Registered: 2019-06-07

Posts: 168

Re: [SOLVED] BTO laptop hangs regularly and can't put my finger on it

Yesterday I found out about the new nvidia beta driver v555. I thought it would be unrelated, but I also had trouble with some kind of ugly graphics tearing in Wayland when I used the nvidia adapter.
This update finally fixes this issue (after 4 years or so?).

But... I haven't had a hang since... It's still early to tell, but maybe the nvidia driver was actually the cause of this?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,429

Re: [SOLVED] BTO laptop hangs regularly and can't put my finger on it

The nvidia driver in version 550 is/was on record for a crashing bug in relation to systemd updates and. corrupting kernel memory (as far as I've heard it's not necessarily fixed yet in 555. but I don't have much concrete evidence) if you want something that fixes the hang for sure use nvidia-open or nvidia-535-dkms in the AUR (which would in turn regress the wayland experience again, the biggest new feature of nvidia-555 is support for explicit sync which will fix graphics issues in xwayland applications)

scippie

Member

Registered: 2019-06-07

Posts: 168

Re: [SOLVED] BTO laptop hangs regularly and can't put my finger on it

It seems to be, I haven't had a hang for a day now and I was really getting lots of hangs before. I'll mark this post as solved.
I am now enjoying the Wayland experience (as I already was doing on my full AMD desktop PC), so I'll stick to this 555 beta until the nvidia-open driver adopts the explicit sync changes.
Thanks.