QubesOS freeze, crash and reboots

It’s not exclusively heating issues that are causing the crashes, but there are heating issues as well. I get heating issues when doing large inter-VM file copies. I don’t know if these heating issues were around prior to 4.1.1.

Yes - my x220 and x230 which have always been stable, show much
hotter running under 4.1.1 - I can drop in old drives and confirm that
this is the case.
But beside that, I now have seemingly random restarts, which like you
are not connected to overheating, and for which I can find no reason,
and no help in the logs.
This is a huge backwards step for me - I’m now working on the basis that
my machine may go down at any time.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
1 Like

If it is worth, I have just encountered random logout and when I logged in back, all vms were there as left before it. At the moment it happened while I tried to update some deb-11-template. Don’t know if it’s related, but more than twice crashes happened to me during update…

I too have seen increased freezes with zero log entries explaining what happened. For me this happens exclusively during salt-based updates. Updating using the old method never leads to a freeze, but was discouraged by the core team.

My “workaround” is to run updates only when I am not actively using the computer (e.g. during breaks) and while all but the sys- qubes are shutdown. This prevents data loss in case of a freeze. It’s a sad and bothersome affair but lacking any usable debug data I don’t see what I could even report other than chiming into this general complaint.

I’ve made sure that it’s not temperature related by running a system monitor in the task bar at all times. Also a temperature shutdown would show up in the logs.

One notable exception to the above is that with 5.15.63 I had these freezes all the time without even touching update. So I think that was a separate issue. Going back to 5.15.52 cured that in the sense that those freezes only happened occasionally while running salt-based updates. I just see 5.15.64 came in, I’ll switch to that and see what happens.

1 Like

I have seen sudden reboots after about a week of running with 5.15.61. So I have updated to 5.15.63 and so far it has been running for 14 days.

Update: It froze up after 3 weeks or so.

Well it’s happening for more than 2 months now…

I don’t want to jinx it, but it appears 5.15.64 is stable for me. I have not experienced any freezes so far.

… and I get what I deserve. The freeze came within hours of posting. :frowning:

1 Like

If I’d be to guess this lasts too long to be related to kernel, and crisscrossing recent issues and some workarounds, my guess is it’s Qubes or Xen related, and most probably related to gui, like someone is experimenting something with it. I wouldn’t be surprised soon to get some good news about sys-gui. Just a hintch, nothing more, looking for something good in this never-before situation.

… and related to function(s) most exercised when doing updates via salt.

I see no evidence of that

I’m not using it

https://forum.qubes-os.org/search?q=glitches%20order%3Alatest

This is also happening to me randomly and is incredibly frustrating. My ThinkPad P51 never crashed with Qubes 4.0, and now frequently crashed with 4.1.

Crashes happen often randomly, and seem to be sometimes triggered by certain activity (e.g., copy/pasting an address from one Firefox browser to another browser window in the same dispoable VM).

One that that CONSISTENTLY causes a crash/reboot is by using the “Qubes Backup Restore - Test restore to verify backup integrity” feature. I can NEVER successfully verify that I’ve correctly created a backup, because this process ALWAYS causes my laptop to crash. This is especially concerning, because now I have no way to verify backup integrity, so if feels as though I have no type of disaster recovery mechanism.

1 Like

Did you check your logs? This actually sounds like a temperature related
issue (CPU load can get quite high and persistent during this
operation). If so, your log would tell you.

To help me better understand the issue, does Qubes 4.1 run hotter than 4.0? This never happened to me with 4.0. Or is it that the temperature measurement is more accurate using 4.1?

Also, how can I check the logs after such a crash?

I am sure there is a more elegant way, but here is my pedestrian approach:

  • immediately after rebooting open dom0 terminal and run sudo journalctl
  • press the End button on your keyboard
  • use the Page Up button on your keyboard to scroll up while keeping an eye on the date/time code … you’ll find a jump in time and a message that your system rebooted
  • look at the lines before that. If you see some lines about ‘temperature critical’ then there you have it

journalctl -r will reverse the order of the log entries so that you only have to scroll down a few lines to find the critical entries

2 Likes

I share the same feeling with my X220 Qubes setup.

This has been my casual observation, as well.

So, what is there to do? Do we, as QubesOS users, have some fix to look forward to with this bothersome situation?

Thank you!

I ran a poll a while ago that gave me the impression that this issue is
not seen by the majority of users. From this thread here I get the
impression it mostly concerns users of older hardware.

My T430 is not purchased from Nitrokey but matches the top configuration
you can get from them … it is therefor identical to a certified
laptop. I wonder if the team sees the same issue when testing Qubes OS
on their certified laptop?

Both my T430s and my 7th Gen Carbon X1 have crashed randomly a few times since installing 4.1,