Arch Linux

Ridwan Rawriet

Member

Registered: 2021-09-28

Posts: 33

[SOLVED]alsactl halting shutdown, increasing CPU load average and more

Since an update from the last week, I've been suffering from this issue. Even if I don't run anything, checking from the tty using the top command, my CPU load average always stays above 3. Running X and a terminal it goes above 4. Also it freezes some specific applications. Most notably firefox. It freezes so frequently and I can't kill it. I've tried using both top and the kill command. Firefox's ram and cpu usage drops to 0 but yet the process doesn't go away.
Next I tried to reboot and after the message "Reached target system Reboot", I got the following messages:

[  810.853055] watchdog: watchdog0: watchdog did not stop
[  982.661835] systemd-shutdown[1]: waiting for proces : alsactl
[  992.671969] shutdown[1]: waiting for proces : alsactl
[ 1082.680572] sd-umount[646]: Failed to unmount /oldroot: Device or resource busy
[ 1162.722119] sd-umount[647]: Failed to unmount /oldroot/sys: Device or resource busy
[ 1162.732016] shutdown[1]: Failed to finalize file systems, ignoring.

And then it stucks there. The only way to get the machine powered off is to long press the power button.
I looked at the wiki and learned that alsactl comes with alsa-utils package. After uninstalling the alsa-utils package everything resolved. I can shutdown and reboot normally now. CPU load average while not running X stays bellow 1, around 0.5. Firefox doesn't freeze.

But I always had alsa-utils installed and before that update everything used to work fine. Thank goodness that I don't strictly need to use alsamixer provided by alsa-utils having pulseaudio and pulsemixer. But why really is this happening? How can I solve this issue for real? If I at the end fail to solve this, is it okay to move on without alsa-utils? What problems may I face or what will I miss out on? As the name suggests, I guess it gives us a number of tools to interact with alsa. So if I don't need to, I should be fine right?
Looking at alsa-utils' package page I found it's a dependency for deepin-api and optional for qtile, i3status-rust and vicious.

Thanks for reading this much with urge to help!

Last edited by Ridwan Rawriet (2022-02-21 09:59:25)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,292

Re: [SOLVED]alsactl halting shutdown, increasing CPU load average and more

You can also just disable/mask the relevant alsactl services/remove the file it normally uses to define whether it should run: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanc … nd_systemd , they should however not lead to this kind of trouble in the first place. Any kind of prior error messages/segfault in a full journal?

sudo journalctl -b-1

for the journal prior to your current boot.

Other avenues, maybe some internal identifiers changed, in which case you should be able to enforce a proper refresh with

sudo alsactl init
sudo alsactl store

Ridwan Rawriet

Member

Registered: 2021-09-28

Posts: 33

Re: [SOLVED]alsactl halting shutdown, increasing CPU load average and more

I tried masking both of those services mentioned in that page. But then saw via systemctl status that alsactl was running instead under systemd-udevd.service that I couldn't stop, didn't try masking though.
Sorry, the installation had kinda scattered as I was trying different DEs and WMs and I just did a reinstall. So cannot post the output of journal right now.
Thank u so much for responding.