Arch Linux

bluewhiteman

Member

Registered: 2021-06-08

Posts: 7

(Almost) total system freeze and no corresponding journalctl entry.

Since a couple of months I have been experiencing this problem and it has not gone away with rolling updates.

At seemingly random points, the GUI randomly disappears (I'm using i3 on Xorg), the CPU goes to 100% and the system practically freezes, although the mouse is still moving around. I'm not able to do anything else including access TTY. I am not sure, if this always happens when I have Firefox in focus.

What is weird is that journalctl has no corresponding entry. The last entry is the NetworkManager connecting post suspend (but the hanging does not always happen post suspend).

How would I go about debugging this?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,423

Re: (Almost) total system freeze and no corresponding journalctl entry.

How are you getting out of this situation? The power button? That can lead to the journal not flushing to disk and thus the problematic situation not showing up, the proper way to debug issues of this kind is enabling https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Keyboa … el_(SysRq) and using the mentioned REISUB sequence (leave a pause of a few secs between the presses, especially the S and the U) to reboot while still unmounting and flushing disks

What's your general hardware? Some issues people might be running into when using i3 is to make sure your .xinitrc is properly setup when using startx so that the session is initialized correctly: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xinit#xinitrc -- note the blue note boxes. Also if you might be using the xf86-video-intel driver on intel that is not actively maintained and unless your iGPU is from 2013 and older you'll want to use modesetting instead.