Computer freezes at random, continues playing audio

Ask Fedora
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1

Hello! For the past month, I’ve been experiencing issues with my computer freezing at random.

For example, if I’m in a voice call, I’m still able to hear and speak to people. If a video is playing, I can’t pause it with the space bar. Basically, everything but audio stops working.

I’m also unable to switch into a different TTY.

I caught a pretty good example of it happening on video:

I took a look at the system’s logs, it looks like this may have something to do with it:

03:39:29 kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:09:00): 38, pid=1879, name=nvidia-powerd, channel 0x00000003 0000c597 00000000 00000000

03:39:29 kernel: NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:09:00: GPU-f0a5430f-38af-0cdb-5e94-3ce4d49cf5c1

I feel like this might be a bug, I just wanted to check in with the forums before filing one.

1 Like
2

I saw this post, which seems similar to my issue:

It does seem to happen when video is playing. The difference on my machine is that the audio doesn’t loop, it just continues playing normally.

The post led me to check out RPM Fusion’s “multimedia” page. So far, I’ve run

sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

then

sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin

and lastly,

sudo dnf install libva-nvidia-driver

I have an NVIDIA graphics card and an AMD processor. I couldn’t tell if the “AMD” in on the webpage was referring to the CPU or the GPU, so I just installed the NVIDIA codec.

That’s it so far, I’m hoping it resolves my issue.

3

Unfortunately, it’s happened twice since my last post. I tried “stress testing” my computer by playing a muted video and some music, the last session lasted 32 minutes and 11 seconds.

I was able to retrieve the logs from when it happened and it appears to be the same NVIDIA driver issue:

Also, I was mistaken, I can toggle the caps lock indicator light on my keyboard, I just can’t switch to a different TTY (I’ll edit the original post). Here I am doing it on video:

Is there anything else I could do, or should this be reported as a bug?

4

This appears to be a bug with NVIDIA’s official drivers, I’ve made a post on their forums about it here:

Basically, I’ve been getting Xid error 38, followed by a repetition of Xid error 109. I found some information about those error codes here:

If my post on NVIDIA’s forums doesn’t get any replies, I’ll message NVIDIA support.

5

Final update on this, it appears that Fedora RPM Fusion simply pushed a bad driver update.

I ended up switching back to Debian and I’m no longer experiencing issues with my computer freezing. It looks like I’m on NVIDIA driver version 550.163.01, whereas on Fedora I was using 580.119.02.

6

Fedora does not distribute the nvidia driver software (other than nouveau which is FOSS)

Please do not point fingers at fedora for software that is not under their control.

Nvidia drivers originate from nvidia and not fedora. There are some 3rd party distributors that package them for installation on fedora but the software does not originate from nor is it distributed by fedora.

7

Sorry about that, I meant to say that RPM Fusion pushed the update. It just hasn’t reached Debian Trixie yet. I do believe that NVIDIA will fix this in the future.