Arch Linux

amaro

Member

From: xfce

Registered: 2014-05-09

Posts: 367

[SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

Hello everybody,

uname -r
5.4.2-1-ck-ivybridge

I noticed that chromuim freezes (the system also freezes) upon opening more than 6 tabs when I use kernels nerwer than 5.4

I have to restart the system manually via the start button

I cannot say when it happened initially but it's definitely true for the last five chromium versions

I tested 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.9 kernels

I get all of them from repo-ck.com

I get chromium from repo-ck.com too

Since 5.4 is the last LTS kernel is it supposed to be like that?

Last edited by amaro (2020-12-01 11:17:14)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,361

Re: [SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

Doesn't happen here and there's not much of use in your post for diagnosing this.

Do you get logs/errors in your journal ... like ( journalctl -b-1 for the previous boot) How does your RAM look like? Is it full/are you starting to swap when this happens?

amaro

Member

From: xfce

Registered: 2014-05-09

Posts: 367

Re: [SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

Sorry for the delay

I don't have logs since I just tested those other kernels

No swap

Here is memory

 free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:     3787      2079        245       708        1462         748
Swap:        0           0           0

vmstat -s
      3878904 K total memory
      2130252 K used memory
      2599596 K active memory
       661608 K inactive memory
       245712 K free memory
        98548 K buffer memory
      1404392 K swap cache
            0 K total swap
            0 K used swap
            0 K free swap
     37132829 non-nice user cpu ticks
       236448 nice user cpu ticks
      3813335 system cpu ticks
    220852748 idle cpu ticks
      1746477 IO-wait cpu ticks
       437688 IRQ cpu ticks
       157409 softirq cpu ticks
            0 stolen cpu ticks
    199791384 pages paged in
     78931784 pages paged out
            0 pages swapped in
            0 pages swapped out
   1231528099 interrupts
   2238239680 CPU context switches
   1604669146 boot time
       700768 forks

These outputs are with kernel 5.4 and chromium working with 20+ tabs

Last edited by amaro (2020-11-24 09:02:05)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,685

Re: [SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

I don't have logs since I just tested those other kernels

That makes no sense, can you please elaborate how you ran those test that you end up w/o them in the journal?

No swap

W/ only 3.6GB RAM that's maybe a problem?

Please
- test this with a non-ck 5.5 kernel
- check the memory status w/ a problematic kernel right before triggering this (adding one more tab…) - including /proc/meminfo
- add some swap space and see what happens,  you don't need a partition: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Swap_file

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How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

amaro

Member

From: xfce

Registered: 2014-05-09

Posts: 367

Re: [SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

Q: "That makes no sense, can you please elaborate how you ran those test that you end up w/o them in the journal?"

A: I upgrade the kernel. Then reboot. Then start chromium. Open a few tabs and it freezes the whole sysytem. Then I reboot manually and try the next kernel.

I will test adding some swap and report the results.

Thank you, seth!

PS @seth
How much swap would you recommend?

Last edited by amaro (2020-11-24 09:48:37)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 77,685

Re: [SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

There're no remnants of the former boot (the one that froze) in the journal ("sudo journalctl -b -1")?

2-4GB swap will be plenty - you don't intend to hibernate the system there, so you don't actually need much to check whether the system memory has to overflow there when you'd expect a freeze.

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How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

amaro

Member

From: xfce

Registered: 2014-05-09

Posts: 367

Re: [SOLVED] chromium freezes with kernels newer than 5.4

Thank you, seth!

Created 1GB swap. Then followed this article https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-softw … o-fix-that

It suggests

vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50
vm.swappiness=1

No problems with chromium now. Tested 5.7.19 and 5.9.3 kernels.

p.s. Thanks for the reminder to run  'sudo journalctl -b -1' too!