Help debugging laptop crashes on Linux?

[Vishwanath_E.V.S]

Hey All,

Apologies if this has been asked before, but I can’t seem to find a thread with an issue similar to mine.
I’m running a DIY FW laptop with Manjaro KDE, on an i5. Of late, and with increasing frequency, there’ll come a time when my laptop just ups and freezes, and then the caps lock blinks a few times before the laptop shuts down completely.

I unfortunately have no insight into what could be going wrong, or how I could debug this. I’ve tried looking at journalctl, but am again at a loss on how to parse the messages I see there. Any help could be appreciated, thank you!

[amoun]

How’s the temperature? Have you check the CPU usage etc.
if you have had it for a while maybe there is dust in the fan tracks?

[Vishwanath_E.V.S]

I haven’t been monitoring the temperatures or CPU usage explicitly, but the fan (which is usually my proxy) hasn’t been too loud. Will monitor going forward, thanks!

[Starlight]

I haven’t seen these issues myself yet on Pop!_OS Linux, but there have been some posts mentioning similar freezing issues in Linux. I’ve listed some below for your convenience.

Intermittent freezes in Linux

Over the weekend I received my Framework and have been working on getting it set up. I purchased the memory and storage separately and it seemed from reading the specs that they should be compatible. However, I am experiencing intermittent freezes while running Linux (I have tried PopOs and Ubuntu 22.04; have not tried Windows nor have it available). The freezes always come within an hour or so of use, and usually less than that. There doesn’t seem to be any connection between anything I’m doing…

Linux freezing on multiple distros

Is anyone else having issues with linux just full on freezing? I just got my framework laptop today and have spent my day troubleshooting this issue. After a random amount of time, everything just freezes up including mouse and keyboard and can only be fixed by holding the power button. I’ve had it happen on popos 21.10 and Fedora 35. Its occurred when in the terminal, in firefox, and with 0 apps opened in the gnome activities screen.

Is it just me or is Fedora Silverblue really unstable?

I was using ubuntu up until last week when I decided to switch, though up until the month before that I was using windows. I wanted a more stable experience that I was less likely to break, and I really didn’t like how snaps worked. I heard the main reason for using Silverblue was for if you wanted a really stable experience, but so far it’s turning out to be the oposite. At least for me, Silverblue has been the most unstable distro I’ve tested. I haven’t really installed or changed much, beside…

[Jerry_Vinokurov]

Since my post was linked in this thread, I would suggest trying to load Linux with nomodeset passed as an option from Grub. For reasons I don’t understand, loading the Intel graphics driver reliably results in freezes within 10 minutes; otherwise the system is stable. I cannot say that I’ve seen the blinking caps lock though. But try my suggestion and see if that helps.

[Richard_Tango-Lowy]

@Vishwanath_E.V.S

am again at a loss on how to parse the messages

Start with

journalctl -f -p err

to see if there’s anything obvious. The words panic or segmentation fault are usually big clues. Then look for relevant text nearby, and search for it online. Something like: “kernel panic” “blah blah type error content here” manjaro and see what comes up. The arch and manjaro forums might also be helpful.

sudo dmesg

is a good idea, too. Look for the same sort of stuff.

Good luck!

[Vishwanath_E.V.S]

Thank you @Starlight, @Jerry_Vinokurov and @Richard_Tango-Lowy ! I haven’t had any crashes again, but these are good steps to implement and look out for the next time it happens!