So yesterday I reinstalled Manjaro KDE Plasma fresh… spent the majority of the day setting up all my applications and settings, created some backups, etc… and went to bed.
When I sat down to my PC this morning I shook the mouse to power up my monitors, logged in, and found myself unable to interact with much. Firefox and Thunderbird were unresponsive, couldn’t even close them… I didn’t notice it right away, but KSysGuard showed that some apps like Thunderbird listed “disk sleep” under CPU Utilization, and the System Load tab showed 3 cores were pinned at 100%.
So I thought I’d reboot, and found I couldn’t click the taskbar to bring up the menu… good thing Yakuake responded to the keyboard shortcut… typed in reboot and watched the slowest never ending screenful of text that I waited a while for before I hit the reset button.
Turned out that wasn’t an amazing idea… but created an opportunity to test out restoring my Timeshift and Back In Time backups… and thankfully the recovery looks good, but the original issue was obviously still at large.
I can’t remember what I searched for, but initially I found references to Power Management settings potentially playing a role and followed this archived post three areas of recommended changes.
- I hadn’t made any systemd changes the first install, but the changes were easy enough to make
- The Desktop Environment changes though did point out some things I done differently the second time around… I had only updated the “On AC Power” settings instead of all 3 tabs… and On Battery was set to Suspend Session via Sleep.
- I even went one step further and made sure all 3 power sections had nothing to do with sleep/hibernate… including defining a “special behavior” under Activity Power Settings to “Never shutdown/sleep”
- I found the Kernel changes weren’t required at all in 21.07
I’ve let the screen energy saving kick in a couple times, but haven’t been away long enough to know if these changes are my solution.
I’d also bumped into this post which seemed to focus on the kernel as the fix, and ensuring to use the latest LTS kernel. Well, as far as I can tell I am on the latest LTS Kernel… 5.10.49-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
I can see that the 5.12.16-1 and 5.13.1-3 kernel are available in the Manjaro Settings Manager, but neither is LTS… and perhaps that isn’t a problem. Is there a way I can figure out if a newer non-LTS kernel would be a good choice or not? I know that 5.10 was released in Dec 2020… only a month or two after AMD released my CPU/GPU, so maybe the newer non-LTS kernels would bring more compatibility/stability improvements?
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
Also… I think my MSI x570 Unify motherboard may have a new BIOS update… but how can I tell if the BIOS update might play a role in addressing this issue (and not cause other issues) when lately they seem to be “just” AGESA updates? Typically I would go for one that’s non-Beta like “Update to AMD ComboAM4PIV2 1.2.0.2” over a beta “Update to AMD ComboAM4PIV2 1.2.0.3b” choice… but is there something in the kernel change logs that could help me identify which would be the better option or if either would have an impact?