Very concerning behavior from Qubes. Whenever I try to play music, watch movie or do anything that requires playing sound for a longer time the whole system starts lagging up until the point where it freezes completely. Not just the VM, the whole system. I need to hard shutdown it by keeping the power button pressed. I think it can go onto login screen when left unattended but still remains completely frozen when entering back. I’m playing sound using a USB cable (DAC) connected to an amplituner. I tried both directly attaching the USB device to a qube and after getting this behavior I set up a sys-audio qube using Neowutran’s guide but that didn’t stop the problem. How can playing sound destabilize the whole OS? I’ve found one thread on the forum that dealt with freezing while reading HDD and the recommendation was to boot Xen with sched=credit parameter for better vCPU to physical CPU allocation. That didn’t work here so far when I tried it. It is really scarry tbh that a whole system can freeze like this from just playing sound. I’m at a loss here. What can I do? There are no logs about errors during when lagging starts and ofc I cannot see the logs when it fully freezes. The lagging starts after ca 10 second of playing sound and gets gradually worse. If I manage to stop the sound from playing before it fully freezes the system keeps operating normally.
Damn, that doesn’t sound like long. I think you should make an issue on the issue tracker with as many details as possible.
Looking through the issue tracker for system freezing I think I’ve found the problem, fingers crossed. Intel’s HWP (some sort of autonomous power adjustment system for CPU according to LLM) not playing well inside Xen hypervisor. Adding cpufreq=xen:hwp=off to the xen grub commandline was suggested on github and it looks like this fixed my issue too. It looks like it disables HWP and gives control directly to Xen. We’ll see if this solution is permanent.