Arch Linux

Empijei

Member

Registered: 2016-08-29

Posts: 3

Sudden freeze with awesome wm and thinkpad carbon X1

Since the start of June i have been experiencing sudden freezes of the whole system.

Here is some info:
The laptop works perfectly with arch and any wm that is not awesome (I tried lxde, xfce and gnome)
The laptop worked fine at least until the last days of May
I have tried downgrading all of awesome's dependencies to a date where everything worked fine, with no success
The freeze is random and does not seem to be related to any event
When the computer freezes nothing works. The computer stops responding to pings, there is no "Ctrl+Alt+F2", no "Ctrl+Alt+Whatever".
The only way to recover is a hard reboot holding down the power button.
Any file that was being written during the crash (including logs) just contains a bunch of zeroes (AKA bytes composed only by 0)

How can i solve this problem and keep awesome wm?

PS: I have tried with both the default awesome rc.lua and a custom one.

Last edited by Empijei (2016-08-29 08:49:13)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,774

Re: Sudden freeze with awesome wm and thinkpad carbon X1

When it freezes, are the keyboard LEDs blinking?  That is a sure indication of a kernel panic.

If not, have you tried the magic SysRq keys (kernel mode keyboard shortcuts) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke … uts#Kernel
Note that you have to have enabled them prior to needing them

Edit: Oh, and welcome to the Arch Linux forums.

Last edited by ewaller (2016-08-29 15:10:23)

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Empijei

Member

Registered: 2016-08-29

Posts: 3

Re: Sudden freeze with awesome wm and thinkpad carbon X1

When it freezes, are the keyboard LEDs blinking?  That is a sure indication of a kernel panic.

I checked but nope, no blinking

If not, have you tried the magic SysRq keys (kernel mode keyboard shortcuts) https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ke … uts#Kernel
Note that you have to have enabled them prior to needing them

No, I honestly didn't even know about them, but I'll enable them in case the issue comes back.

Edit: Oh, and welcome to the Arch Linux forums.

Thank you :>

I posted yesterday a bug report on the github repo for awesome and a fix for the issued seemed to come in launching awesome with the --no-argb flag.
https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/is … -243229551

I'll try to pinpoint the bug in the intel driver features listed in the reply to my report and post a reply to that thread.

Thank you very much for your time.

Update: --no-argb didn't actually do a thing. I will keep trying to figure out the problem. And the SysRq was not doing anything.

Last edited by Empijei (2016-08-30 19:31:27)

Empijei

Member

Registered: 2016-08-29

Posts: 3

Re: Sudden freeze with awesome wm and thinkpad carbon X1

The fix was to add i915.enable_rc6=0 to the boot options.