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[solved] Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

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mnalli
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[solved] Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#1 Post by mnalli »

Hello everybody,

one month ago updated my Debian 10 system to Debian 11. For one month everything went without any significant problem. Today I started to experience a very annoying problem that I'm worried will make the system unusable: I've experienced a full and unrecoverable freeze of the system, I could not even access a terminal with Ctrl + Alt + F1. This happened in total 3 times today (until yesterday everything was going well).

This has happened in moments when I was really not doing anything special: stuff like surfing the web and listening to an audio CD. Once it happened immediately after boot, while I was trying to access the wifi network. In all cases I had to power off the computer.

Has anyone experienced something similar here? I can't really see what I've done, assuming that it is my fault. The only changes that I applied recently (yesterday) are the installation of a security update of xen and the deactivation of the kwallet component of KDE, but I find hard to believe this problem is caused by this.

Now I've restored, just to be sure, the previous configuration of kwallet: so far it has not happened again, but only few hours passed.

Any related experience?
Last edited by mnalli on 2021-10-01 15:51, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#2 Post by Hallvor »

Without any more info, it's really anyone's guess. I am guessing hardware issues. ;)

Try this:

Code: Select all

# journalctl --since yesterday --until now
Report back when you see anything out of the ordinary/errors when the freeze occurs. To make it easier, note the time of the freeze and check what's going on in the logs.
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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#3 Post by craigevil »

An OS can only do what you tell it to do.
When you mess with required system components things break.
Debian works and is way more stable whether it be as a server or as a desktop than any other distro.
I know people that have ran it for yrs and even some since it first came out.
Personally I ran it on a Thinkpad for over 10 yrs and never had any issues.
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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#4 Post by Hallvor »

Removed because of a misunderstanding. Sorry.
Last edited by Hallvor on 2021-09-22 13:00, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#5 Post by sunrat »

@craigevil @Hallvor Not sure if you realise but the previous 2 posts were not from the OP and are totally irrelevant.

@rongfu This is a help thread, not the place for random opinions. There is an Offtopic section and a Discussion section for that. Thanks.

Edit: Posts now removed to maintain continuity of thread.
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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#6 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

Are there any flashing lights when this happens? Caps lock led on the keyboard for example. These indicate a kernel panic. My young daughter could induce these by some mysterious process on one computer running Jessie. The same thing never happened to me. The kernel panics stopped with the upgrade to Stretch.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#7 Post by mnalli »

Thank you very much for all your replies, unfortunately I read them only now.

With journalctl I didn't discover anything useful: it seems there is a large time period missing, even if I am quite sure that I was using my computer in that time. I still did not have time to look deeply into it though.

Since I restored the default configuration of kwallet it seems that everything is working perfectly again, it's super weird. As soon as I have time I will try to deactivate it again and see if the system freezes again. In case I will file a bug report.

Thank you very much again.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#8 Post by mnalli »

FreewheelinFrank wrote: 2021-09-22 19:22 Are there any flashing lights when this happens? Caps lock led on the keyboard for example. These indicate a kernel panic. My young daughter could induce these by some mysterious process on one computer running Jessie. The same thing never happened to me. The kernel panics stopped with the upgrade to Stretch.
Interesting... I didn't notice anything like that. I will try to reproduce the problem again and I will check it.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#9 Post by mnalli »

Okay... Where to start?

I tried to disable again the KDE wallet. In the beginnin, everything worked fine for some time, but after several hours it happened again. When it happened, I was simply reading a pdf and listening to some music. The system became completely unresponsive and kept on playing the last couple of seconds of the song. The difference comparing to the other times is that I had an external monitor plugged in.

At this point I powered it off pushing the button. When I tried to boot it again, I found that it's not booting anymore, or better, it's booting, but with the monitor completely off: not even the splash screen is appearing and the backlight of the monitor is off. I think I broke the GPU somehow.

The computer was really old but this is so annoying and it proves which consequences can have this sorts of bugs in a system, even if the hardware problem was related to the fact that I powered it off probably.

It's incredible, right now that I have to start working on my master thesis. At this point I think I will file a bug for kwallet on debian, even if I don't have a way to test it further.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#10 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

Could just be hardware failure with age.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#11 Post by mnalli »

FreewheelinFrank wrote: 2021-09-28 12:27 Could just be hardware failure with age.
Yes, for sure. But anyway the freeze seemed to be related with the disabling of kwallet in my case.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#12 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

Correlation does not imply causation. If you can, put a different graphics card in it (if you think the HD and CPU are still working) and see what happens.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#13 Post by seeker5528 »

This already seemed like a hardware issue, but after this latest symptom description that seems even more likely to be the case.

There was mention of an external monitor so is this a laptop or an all-in-one system? All-in-one systems can be as bad or worse than laptops when it comes to what you can and can't replace when they have a hardware issue.

When you say you don't get the splash screen, is that the OS splash screen or you fail to get any picture on the screen at all?

Assuming a laptop and nothing getting displayed on the screen at any point....

If you get one or more LED lights lighting up and some fan noise and nothing else, you are pretty limited with laptops on testing even on the off chance that they had a video card that could be replaced it is often hard to find these replacements. Most often the video is built in to the CPU or soldered on to the motherboard. If the video is built into the CPU the odds are lower of having a hardware related video issue, with onboard video in general system RAM is used for video RAM so a symptom of bad RAM could show as video issues.

Symptoms of a bad CPU are sometimes all over the map leading you to blame other things before the process of elimination leads you back the the CPU.

If you have one or more lights that flash in a repeating pattern or a pattern of beeps when you try to boot the system, this would usually be a diagnostic code you can look up on the internet.

If you don't have any of that the first thing would be unplug the power, unplug or remove the battery, let the computer sit for 2 or 3 minutes to let all the power drain out of the capacitors, then leave the battery unplugged, plug the power in and see if the computer boots.

If you still don't get anything on the screen the next thing would be remove the hard drive and see if you get a picture when you try to boot.

Next pop that RAM chips out and put them back in to reseat the chips. If you have more than one RAM chip you can try them one at a time in one RAM slot and then the other.

If you still fail to get a picture, remove the WiFi card and any other cards, if there are USB ports that are attached to the motherboard with a cable, unplug those, unplug the keyboard and try to boot again.

If it boot after that, plug the keyboard back in and see if it boots, then install the rest of the stuff except for the hard drive one at a time, checking each time to see if the computer still boots.

If it still fails after this you can take it in somewhere and see if they have some different RAM they can try in the system. And they may have a different CPU to try in the system assuming the CPU is not soldered on the motherboard.

If you are not comfortable doing all this stuff I would take it in somewhere and have them diagnose the issue.

If you can get the system booting again, I would get SystemRescue

https://www.system-rescue.org/System-tools/

leave the hard drive out of the system, test the RAM and do the stress test without the hard drive in the system, then put the hard drive back in boot into SystemRescue again and get everything you care about off of the hard drive then test the hard drive.

SystemRescue includes gsmartctl for viewing the SMART attributes and doing the SMART self testing if you would prefer that over smartctl at the command line and whdd for some an additional testing if whdd shows a bunch of spots on the hard drive that are slow to read I would consider this a failure or sign of pre-failure if you prefer that term.

I have not used whdd, but after watching the demo video it looks like something I want to add to my testing process, the rescue features are a whole different question.

If you can get this far without seeing an obvious problem, then stress test again with the hard drive in the system, some problems only happen when you stress test everything together.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#14 Post by seeker5528 »

I looked at whdd,on SystemRescue, it has the ability to show you the SMART attributes, do your basic read/verify test, has an option to write zeros to the drive if it fails the read/verify test and you want to wipe the drive and test again.

Usually I use pv for writing zeroes to a drive, if it has write errors I am not going to want to use that drive again anyway.

Code: Select all

pv /dev/zero > /dev/sdX
replace sdX with the device name of the disk you want to wipe.

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Re: Unrecoverable system freeze in Debian 11

#15 Post by mnalli »

In the end it wasn't an unrecoverable hardware problem: it must have been something related to some statical electricity. Removing battery and power and pushing the power button several times was enough to fix the problem. Somehow the fact that I was using an external screen and powered off the computer with the button must have left the GPU in a problematic state, but now everything is working again.

The problem of the freeze must be related for sure to the deactivation of the kwallet, as it never happens if it is enabled. I think at this point I can mark it as "solved". I will also open a bug report.

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