Qubes OS 4.3 started freezing

User Support
1

Recently, my system has been freezing completely, leaving me unable to use the keyboard or mouse. This has happened twice in the past three days, and I can’t recall any similar problems before this.

I suspect this might be related to some updates I applied recently. When the freeze occurs, the screen locks up, and nothing responds. I’ve tried waiting it out, but no change occurs, requiring me to perform a hard reboot.

How can I debug this issue to figure out what’s happening? When the computer is in that state, I don’t think there is anything I can do.

2

Is the computer fan speeding at maximum speed?

Could you try to play some sound, and see if it loops into a “BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ” or if it stops entirely? First case, it’s certainly a hardware issue, latter case, more likely to be a software/driver bug.

3

I don’t know if it was maximum, but the fan were running fast as if the computer was doing heavy work, so it may have been.

I don’t know how to reproduce it, so I can’t test, I didn’t notice either happening yet.

My hardware was purchased in 2022 if that matters, so it is rather new and hopefully not failing.

4

I noticed why it happens: if I unplug my headphones (3.5mm jack) Qubes OS will freeze in 1-2 hours.

What can I do with this information?

1 Like
5

Currently I have similar problems with Qubes OS completly freezing. Sometimes shortly after a freeze I can set up some SysRq commands to sync and write some logs. After a reboot I was able to see some error messages inside journal

dom0 virtextend[2554]: internal error: connection closed due to keepalive timeout
dom0 kernel: rcu: INFO: rcu_preempt detected stalls on CPUs/tasks:
...

Usually it freezes during idle time almost every day.

I had several installations with 4.3 RCs which didn’t bring up any freezes at all. Since I was installing a fresh 4.3.0 and updating all packages it started to freeze after some time.
At the moment I am investigation this issue with two machines with identical hardware (AMD Ryzen 7 5800x + Nvidia GPU). After a fresh installation of 4.3.0 so far it’s stable without any freezes. I already played with different kernel versions but I think it’s one of the firmware packages, maybe amd-gpu-firmware, nvidia-gpu-firmware or amd-ucode-firmware.

6

Can you tell me how to do this? After freeze, the only thing I can do is hard reboot and fsck the disk.

However, for me the freezes only happen after I unplug my headphones. If I plug them back in, it still happens. But I notice if I never unplug them the freeze never happens.

7

How long do you have kept the system running with plugged in headphones? The 3.5mm jack should not have anything to do with the freezing in my opinion, but I could be wrong.
To set up some SysRq commands see following wiki entry: Magic SysRq key - Wikipedia

For example press [Alt]+[SysRq]b to sync the filesystems.

8

A long time, 24+ hours many times.

I thought it had to do with an update, but I only recently have a new usecase where I’m using two PCs. This is why I’ve started moving my headphones between the two computers.

I’ve noticed that the freeze only happens when I unplug my headphones and use the other PC. I haven’t been present a single time during a freeze, which is why I still can’t answer solene’s question.

I am not 100% certain either, but it seems to correlate heavily with unplugging my headphones. It never happened before, and so far I only notice it within an 1-2 hour window of me unplugging them.

I will try this, thanks.

9

It happened again. Computer works all day, unplug headphones, 30 minutes later the fan was loud and the entire OS had frozen.

I still have zero logs indicating a problem, but I did not have time to configure SysRq yet.

10

Weird question: are you using usb headphones with an audiovm?

11

Since everything locks up, have you had a chance to check the logs after a hard reboot? Running sudo journalctl -b -1 -p 0…3 in dom0 might show if there was a ‘last gasp’ error message (like a kernel panic or GPU hang) before it died. Also, are you on the latest kernel? Sometimes switching between the stable and kernel-latest packages helps with these random 4.3 freezes.