Screen freeze and high CPU for xfwm4

User Support
21

fwiw I also encounter this bug on my NitroPad v54 so if it is a hardware issue it is most likely an issue with this model in general as opposed to a defect in a specific laptop build

22

A few questions to @novacustom, if I may:

  • I understand you are willing to replace a laptop with a hardware defect. Thank you for that.

    Now let’s assume for a moment this is a SW issue:

    1. What would be the next steps?

    2. (assuming a SW issue) Could a “Qubes certified laptop” suffer from freezing every day?

      I am asking because I am less and less sure to understand:

      • what guarantee a “Qubes certified laptop” brings?
      • what guarantee a “Qubes certified laptop” does not bring?
  • I certainly don’t have your experience nor your expertise! May I ask you your train of thoughts and your conclusion for that question?

… and an update:

  • I have tried the workaround xfwm4 --replace & 3 times now without much success. Happy to hear back from your experiences.
23

Hi,

Thank you for getting back to us.

It should not, of course.

  • It guarantees that the configuration that you have is being tested by the Qubes OS certification team and that new releases are being tested on this hardware as well, before new release candidates are marked as stable.
  • It does not guarantee that the device cannot suffer from any hardware issue. In fact, any device could always suffer from any hardware issue. It’s our job to minimize this chance, and we are financially pushed to do so: you can imagine that solving issues like these (assuming it is a hardware issue) cost a lot of time and money. Nevertheless, we take responsibility to solve warranty cases as quickly as possible.
  • I raised the question because I assumed that the software workaround would have helped, but I understand it does not.
  • The first logical step would be to completely reinstall Qubes OS (latest version, R4.3). Please remember to select the kernel-latest option at the GRUB menu of the installer. This way, we can rule out a software configuration issue.

Honestly, I don’t think it can be a software issue if the issue happens on a clean installation as well. This is because we are selling our laptops a lot with Qubes OS and we do not recognize this issue; it is not a known problem for us.

If you would like to diagnose for yourself, the next thing you could do is to run an internal memory test: MemTest86 - Download now!

Such test should pass without any errors. In case it returns any errors, it would be clear that the internal memory is faulty and should be repaired.

If the test would pass, there could still be some kind of rare hardware issue. In this case, we would need to replace other parts as well to fix this permanently.

1 Like
24

Hi there,
just to add a similar experience:
I’m facing the same problem on a Nitro Pad v54 with Dasharo Heads and Qubes 4.2.4.

First of all thanks a lot for the initial workaround to kill xfwm4!!! Without this I would probably have stopped using Qubes if not found on my own otherwise.

This proposed workaround in related Github issue Screen freeze and high CPU for xfwm4 (Qubes certified laptop) ¡ Issue #10415 ¡ QubesOS/qubes-issues ¡ GitHub

DISPLAY=:0 xfwm4 --replace &

has the same effect for me as the initial pkill xfwm4: Freeze stops but network icon gone. I see the same warnings as Laurik821 in the Github issue but the word count on WaitingForSession in ps -ef output is 0, not 256.

You proposed to make a memtest but it seems to require UEFI. Is there an equivalent I could do if using Heads?