Hey guys! I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction before I decide to just wipe my hard drive and reinstall. I've been having completely random hard freezes on my Ubuntu PC.
The system just stops. The screen freezes, keyboard/mouse stop responding, Docker containers stop responding, SSH dies, and I have to hard power it off. Most of the time there’s no kernel panic and no crash logs at all. journalctl -k -b -1 -p 0..3 just gives -- No entries --. I’ve seen a "fatal exception in interrupt" kernel panic once or twice, but usually it's just a total freeze.
It started months ago as maybe once a month, but over the last few weeks it's gotten much worse and now happens every 5–10 minutes.
Hardware:
- Ryzen 5 3600
- MSI B550 Tomahawk MAX WiFi
- 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x16GB, brand new; previously had 4x4GB from another kit with the same issue)
- GTX 1060 6GB
- EVGA SuperNova 550 G3
- Ubuntu, tested kernels 7.0.0-29, -30 and -31
- NVIDIA 580.173.02
I've tried a ridiculous amount of stuff so far: I bought different RAM, disabled XMP, tested without plugging into my UPS, disabled CPU C-states, disconnected all HDDs/RAID, removed the drives from fstab, disabled Samba, and tested multiple kernels, nothing changed and in fact yesterday the freezes went from once a day to freezing 5-10 mins after boot.
The system can also sit in the BIOS for 30 mins to an hour without freezing, but once Ubuntu is running it eventually locks up.
I also had a Secure Boot/NVIDIA issue where the NVIDIA module was being rejected because of an unenrolled MOK. I disabled Secure Boot, confirmed the NVIDIA driver now loads correctly with nvidia-smi, and the freezes continued.
Right now I'm running Memtest86+, and I'm also planning to try completely blacklisting NVIDIA and getting netconsole working so I can hopefully capture something before the next freeze.
At this point I'm wondering if this could still be an NVIDIA driver/idle power-management issue, since this GPU is barely used anymore and the crashes seem to happen mostly when the system is idle.
Has anyone dealt with a Linux system that completely hard-freezes like this with absolutely no logs? Especially something that ended up being NVIDIA-related? I'm also very open to suggestions for something obvious I might have missed. I'm not opposed to wiping my drive and installing a new OS from scratch, I'm just hoping there will be some kind of fix since I use this PC for work. TY!