System Specs before starting:
Fedora 43
KDE Plasma
Wayland
i7-6700K
GeForce GTX 1660 super
32 GB memory (unsure if ddr3 or ddr4)

Hi! Recently I convinced my partner to make the switch to linux, specifically, Fedora. However, sometimes her computer will just completely freeze, and requires a hard reboot, I haven’t gotten the chance to test if reisub works while it’s frozen. Also, very, very rarely, it will come back to life, or show some signs of life; today, it froze, but I could still hear her over our call, and then it slowly advanced the display over the next couple minutes- as in the mouse was moving very slowly according to how she was moving her mouse when it froze- before stopping again and requiring a reboot.

I’m pretty sure this has been happening since day 1, fresh install, so I don’t think it’s anything we did/installed that broke things.

My gut tells me that it’s an issue with her memory, but it seems like the majority of the time, it happens while using graphically intensive apps/games, but that’s not always consistent. This leads me to think it’s actually an nvidia issue, we’ve tried both the neuveau and proprietary drivers, but it happens on both.

Does anyone have any ideas about this?

  • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
    19·
    17 hours ago

    I had this same thing happen a while back. You know what it was? A bad USB device!

    I had a little USB debug probe that went bad (somehow) and it totally screwed up my USB hub’s ability to… Stay stable? Haha, that’s the best way to put it.

    Anyway, the fix was to remove the device and disconnect the USB hub (and its power) for a few seconds. If I ever reconnected the probe, the problem would recur within an hour or two.

    Here’s how you can check for something similar: Run dmesg and look for regular messages like, “unable to enumerate device”. It’ll tell you which bus and port it’s on but that’s not easy to figure out so just keep unplugging things until you get the one matching the device that’s regularly throwing errors in dmesg. Keep it disconnected, power everything off (PC, USB hub’s, etc) for a few seconds and then try running without that device for a while. It might be the culprit!

    • refalo@programming.dev
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I would still consider that a software bug on Linux’s part if it allows a USB device to bring the whole system down.

    • Lucy :3@feddit.org
      2·
      12 hours ago

      Same thing, but with an external NVMe enclosure and it crashing the whole USB Bus of my MB it was plugged into until poweroff and poweron (not reboot!), meaning my peripherals disconnected too. Basically fixed by moving it to the front USB-Ports, now it crashes much rarer (previously a minute of playing MC with the profile residing on the NVMe would crash it, but not hours of RDR2 or similar. Very weird. Not it does after a few hours of MC), and can reliably be recovered by replugging.

      Still looking forward to a new PC with more that one NVMe-PCIe Slot though.

    • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vipOPEnglish
      6·
      17 hours ago

      Interesting, I have noticed that every time this happens, her camera usually gets fucked up for a little while. I guess it’s possible that it has something to do with that, I’ll have to check that next time it happens. That’s the only usb device she has plugged in that I’m suspicious of. The only other things she has are her mouse, keyboard, microphone, wireless headset dongle, and wifi adapter.