I want to reiterate the above that this could be a hardware issue. Qubes OS and other resource intensive tasks tend to trigger hardware faults.
Have you run MemTest86 or tried different RAM configurations (e.g., if you have two sticks of RAM, remove one, then see if the system is stable or buggy)?
Triaging other components is more difficult.
If you have random freezes after installing with the default configuration (especially under heavy I/O loads, e.g. during template installation or restoring VMs), run sudo swapoff -a in dom0 to temporarily disable swap and see what happens.
The swap on LVM-partition on LUKS (Qubes OS uses this configuration by default) has a bug that causes random system freeze (google “lvm luks swap freeze” to see people’s confusion).
Unfortunately, as far as I have tried, even R4.2-alpha with kernel-latest 6.1.12 faced that problem. But after configuring it to not use swap, it is quite stable.
I don’t believe that disabling swap is the silver bullet that fixes all cases of system freezes, but I hope it helps someone.
Thank you both @sm95 and @kommuni for the inputs.
I have recently identified closely the trigger for the freeze, which I just explained on another thread and will paste here:
I have the formula to replicate the bug more or less, I just need to very heavily stress my hardware (lots of open vms like 14 or 15, doing specific resource intensive tasks), then I have to open or interact with my KeePass2 instance in the vault vm, right then and there the OS freezes with the bug I described at the beginning.
If I do not interact with KeePass2 this doesn’t happen no matter what I’m doing.
I will soon change from KeePass2 to another password manager and see if the problem persists.
It might be that the encryption of KeePass has something to do with this, it might over stress the cpu or something.
I have 64gb of DDR5 but at this point even if it is hardware it’s definitely not a random freeze, and I can replicate the issue, the good thing is that now that I know the trigger, I can avoid it.
Hi @leo thanks for the link to updating UEFI / BIOS from Linux, didn’t know it was (sometimes) possible, quite interesting (thinking about rootkits in general).