My mother’s computer started locking up at random times, sometimes even a few minutes after starting up though at other times it may not do so for hours. This seems to have started after a Manjaro update late last month. It’s very annoying and I’d appreciate any advice on what I should try to see what’s happening: I forgot the exact dmesg and similar commands I’m supposed to post.
What I did so far was install the amdgpu-experimental package: The machine uses an older video card that still picks radeonsi by default. However neither module appears to influence the crash, I doubt a graphics issue is the cause.
I also left the top command running in the foreground to see if it would capture a memory leak, as I suspect Firefox could be producing one. The result frozen on the screen doesn’t seem to suggest one per say. What did surprise me is that it claims Firefox is using 163% or 109% CPU which is impossible: What could cause such an abnormal reading for the top two processes?
OK thanks, it’s always worth checking (I have run into similar issues in the past).
As for the Firefox readings, I’ve seen it exceed “100%” before (but probably not on this system, Firefox is known to be a memory hog (and leaks like a sieve when playing lots of YouTube videos, for example).
It would be an idea to post results of inxi -zv8 (which I should have said in my previous post).
I’ve seen people have issues with insufficient RAM, no SWAP defined etc. and this will help to show us what system we are looking at.
She mainly browses Facebook and news article sites that are very lightweight. I’m still in the process of determining whether Firefox is the trigger and exactly how this happens, hard to know as the crashes are rare enough that you can’t reproduce them on demand to get a clear verdict.
Locking up means total freeze: Can’t move the mouse cursor, can’t toggle the num lock / caps lock keyboard LED’s, can’t switch to another TTY… just the image frozen on the screen. I think red HDD led appeared to stay on, but not at full intensity rather as if it may still be working.
The output for the journalctl command is much larger and seemingly more wholesome so I put that on pastebin. It’s filled with “stack trace of thread” errors apparently, both Firefox and redeonsi are mentioned though I’m now running it on amdgpu so I don’t see how that is used.
I suggest you boot a live ISO and run a filesystem check on the partitions
While you are at it - fsck - in any situation a little swap is better than none.
For a GPU that old I don’t think any experimental package will do any good.
I suggest you cut 32G from the end of your root partition and reassign as swap.
32G is really just a number, taking system memory 24G plus guessing 8GB video ram, see → Swap - Manjaro - as always decide for yourself what may be adequate.
I use ZSwap memory compression on my laptop: That one is much older, as in only 4GB of RAM old… it’s usable when I’m on a trip although barely, I still need to open many applications one at a time. Yet even my laptop doesn’t lock up like that, it only freezes for a few seconds when its memory gets full.
We both have UBlock Origin installed for ages, in the past we used Adblock Plus but I switched them to UBlock a while back. The main risk with Firefox used to be memory leaks, some sites would cause it to use a lot of GB for no apparent reason. However that doesn’t appear to be what’s happening here.
Checked Dolphin again: Both drives are barely using any disk space, well over 100 GB free on both / and /home. I believe I maxed that motherboard at 24 GB of RAM, it’s one of the few triple-channel memory models that existed 12 years ago. As such memory should be more than plenty, I decided not to get a SWAP partition for that reason, especially since I heard they can wear out an SSD and I already lost my first one on which I had SWAP years ago.
This happened to me after the last update too. Not long after that update another update for firefox showed up. After updating it has not happened since.
What Firefox update fixed it for you? Was it posted yesterday? I think it froze less today, I’ll ask her tomorrow to be sure, maybe it at least improves it.
Also does REISUB still work? I remember hearing about this ancient combo ages ago, I think it did nothing when I attempted it once but that was a while ago, not sure what good it does if the keyboard itself is no longer being processed though. Manjaro doesn’t even enable Control + Alt + Backspace to kill the compositor by default, I used to have that in openSUSE and it was useful to recover from some freezes and at least do a clean restart.
Not sure if you already know this, you can enable it in the keyboard options in the keyboard settings.
System Settings → Keyboard → Key Bindings → Key sequence to kill the X server
Yes it works, if you’ve configured it. If the system is locked up, but the kernel isn’t then it would work. The link below, already posted by @Kobold, tells you how to set it up.
When @Kobold says REISUB, in this case he means the magic sys req key used with f (ie Ctrl + Alt + F), which would call the OOM killer. REISUB would restart your computer.
