I have also had these issues recently. Not sure what's causing it On Wed, May 24, 2023, 1:18 PM Abraham S.A.H. wrote:

Did you ever take a look at your system logs and perhaps coredumps?

On Wed, 2023-05-24 at 19:56 +0100, Polarian wrote:

I have found that the most common cause for random lock ups are memory issues.

Hi, I experienced such random lockups usually with broken HDDs. On one of my machines I experienced such an issue with some GTK software. It looked like a defective SSD, but it was a software issue. Only one time I had broken memory and that time the issue was signaled by POST. The machine couldn't go beyond POST. Since the machine didn't cause problems for around six weeks, I would take a look at pacman.log and e.g. downgrade the kernel. I'm not a fan of memtest, however running memtest is a starting point. On my new machine I installed chaotic-aur/memtest86-efi version 10+, alternatively I would use a 10+ life media. Every now and then nothing is broken. Sometimes only a cable, a card or a RAM needs to be plugged in again. I would also take a look at available BIOS and other firmware updates and read the changelogs, if updates should be available. Regards, Ralf

On Thu, 25 May 2023 07:51:59 -0400, Luna Celeste wrote:

On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 09:15:06 +0100, Spencer Collyer wrote:

...

Hi,

Thanks for all the ideas folks. I especially like Andy's idea of setting up netconsole - I've still got my old desktop machine available so will give it a go setting that up at the weekend.

I'm hoping it's not a hardware fault - I'm not a hardware hacker. Hopefully the fact it ran fine for six weeks means the hardware shouldn't be the problem.

Any further ideas gratefully received :)

I had similar issues a while ago and posted about them here. Folks were really helpful! Everyone asked me for a lot of system specs, like processor and graphics card and memory, as well as any major software packages you're running. Specifying those would give people some additional information and direction to provide better assistance. I also suggest you look at that thread:

https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-general@lists.archlinux.org/t...

There are many helpful suggestions there; try the ones that are relevant.

Thanks Luna. I do recall that thread but couldn't find it when I scanned my mailbox. I've located it now so will be taking a look at the suggestions. Regards, Spencer

Are you running something like barrier , or something that could interfere with inputs like that ? x11vnc etc etc. does dmesg say something ? every time i've had issues with something like this and i went the kernel route ended up being something silly like barrier acting up etc etc On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 1:53 PM Matthew Blankenbeheler < thecoolkids322@gmail.com> wrote:

I also have this issue. But, these issues didnt pop up till recently after an update. I have systemd-oomd configured so that should take care of any lockups due to a lack of ram.

On Thu, May 25, 2023 at 7:43 AM Jesse Jaara wrote:

...

Could you simply be running out of RAM? 🤔 Mouse cursor moving but system being otherwise unresponsive sounds a lot like a system that is running low on memory and is trying to move bits in and out of swap.

A memory leak in some app you are using perhaps. Or possibly some Docker image or vm hogging heaps of memory if you do stuff like that.

-- Sincerely, Matthew Blankenbehler

On Mon, 29 May 2023 11:54:07 +0100, Spencer Collyer wrote:

I managed to get netconsole working (had to wait until the long weekend so I could replace my work machine with my old desktop) and I've seen two lockups today, both referring to the nouveau driver. Looking on the ArchWiki I found that there are known problems with this driver and some (unspecified) chips, and the suggestion is to add the kernel parameter `nouveau.noaccel=1', so I'm going to try that.

I had a look at the ArchWiki description of the official drivers and for the driver for my GPU, nvidia-open, it says 'This is currently alpha quality, so there will be issues.' So I think I'll keep away from that for the moment.

I'll report back if adding the kernel parameter helps. If I can get a week of use out of this box with no lockups that will be a start.

Regards,

Spencer

As promised, a quick update. Since adding the kernel parameter I have had no random lockups at all. So it looks like it is working now. As suggested by riveravaldez I will be contacting the nouveau mailing list at some point, but again I'm going to have to wait until I can hook up my old desktop again - work takes priority over that. I do still see one oddity - every now and then when I return to the machine after being away for a while, sometimes the monitor shows no video input. I can bring the machine back to life by tapping the power button off then back on and after a few seconds the screen comes back to life and everything is as I left it. No idea what is causing that - haven't had netconsole running at any point when it's occurred yet. It's more an annoyance than anything else - at least I haven't (yet) lost any work. Regards, Spencer