Hi Guys,
I’ve got a serious problem over here, and I have no idea what triggered it, because I have not changed anything to my configuration, nor have I installed anything. But as it is, my system was working fine until yesterday.
Then I rebooted in order to test the new live ISO of another (and to myself befriended) distribution, and that went well too. But when I then rebooted into Manjaro again — which is my only installed system — things went really strange.
I had already noticed — and other Plasma users with me — that Plasma sometimes gets stuck if one logs in too quickly, in which case only one of my two panels is loading, but it is completely transparent and empty. The desktop also does not respond to right-clicking. Triggering a logout via Ctrl+Alt+Del does bring up the logout dialog, but whichever option you click has no effect — Plasma just stays stuck.
Yakuake — which is started automatically at login — does work, and with a delay, so does the KRunner. As such I was able to start KSysGuard, and it shows the plasmashell process stuck at 17% load.
The CPU temperature is also very high, and even though recent kernels have a bug that causes one core to max out at 100% I/O wait, this was not affecting the CPU temperature so far, but now the temperature reads around 60°C, and especially so on the stuck core. The other cores now hover between 45°C and 52°C. The normal average CPU temperature for this machine is 36°C.
I’ve already tried loads of things, from various commands to try and restart plasmashell — which yields all kinds of weird errors regarding cyclic dependencies, etc. — over several reboots, to even trying an older kernel, which (presumably) did not have the patch yet that caused the high I/O wait. But it’s no use. The result is always the same. Plasma itself is stuck and refuses to properly initialize.
Desktop shortcut keys do work, as does virtual desktop switching and activity switching, although my second activity shows the same wallpaper as my main activity, and that’s not correct either. But like I said, the top panel is completely transparent — it’s not even blurred, as it should be — and it’s empty, while the lower panel — which I’ve pretty much set up as a dock and which houses the activity and desktop pagers — is absent.
I repeat that everything was working perfectly fine up until yesterday — well, barring that high I/O wait, but that was mostly a cosmetic bug. But now something really is hogging my CPU, because the temperature on that core is way too high, and like I said, plasmashell shows as running at a constant 17% CPU load — this is a 6-core Intel i5, so that 17% total load would then indeed be consistent with the maxed-out CPU core.
I really don’t know what to do anymore guys. I’ve been exclusively running GNU/Linux for 24 years on servers and workstations, so I’m no rookie, but I’m at the end of my rope here. Like I said, I have changed nothing to my configuration — well, except for the colors of the CPU sensors in a panel widget — and everything was running fine earlier. The live ISO of the other distribution also ran perfectly fine, and it uses the same Plasma release as we have here in Manjaro Stable.
The only thing I can think of that has changed since the Stable update of 23.07.27 was that there have been updates to manjaro-zsh-settings and spectre-meltdown-checker, but I doubt that either of those two packages would have triggered this situation, and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any problems with my hardware either.
All of my relevant info can be gleaned from clicking my avatar, but I’ll briefly reiterate below…
Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.6
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.108.0
Qt Version: 5.15.10
Kernel Version: 6.1.41-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 6 × Intel® Core™ i5-8400 CPU @ 2.80GHz
Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 630
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
Product Name: MS-7C09
System Version: 1.0
about the about the fact that nothing was changed.