Fedora 35 freezing on VirtualBox

Hi all, this is my first post on this forum: great new user experience! I’m new to Fedora, but not to Linux (started with CentoOS 6 and recently decided to make the jump to Fedora). Definitely not an expert, though.

About a week ago, 35 started freezing randomly - not during boot, as many have experienced, but just whilst using it. I’ve done lots of searching, and found no common theme that could explain it. Hopefully the good folks on this forum can help :smiling_face:

First, the basic setup:

Hardware
HP Envy x360 (2021)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 (5000 Series)
Display: AMD Radeon
RAM: 16 GB

Hypervisor & VM
VirtualBox v6.1.34 r150636 (Qt5.6.2)
2 vCPUs
4 GB RAM
Chipset: PIIX3
I/O APIC enabled
EFI disabled
Hardware clock in UTC time
PAE/NX not enabled
Nested VTx/AMD-V option not available
Video memory: 128 MB (the max configurable)
Graphics controller: VMSVGA
3D Acceleration disabled

OS (excerpted from fpaste’s output)

=== fpaste 0.4.2.0 System Information ===
* OS Release (cat /etc/*-release | uniq):
     VERSION_CODENAME=""
     PRETTY_NAME="Fedora Linux 35 (Workstation Edition)"
     ANSI_COLOR="0;38;2;60;110;180"

* Kernel (uname -r ; cat /proc/cmdline):
     5.17.4-200.fc35.x86_64
     BOOT_IMAGE=(hd0,msdos1)/vmlinuz-5.17.4-200.fc35.x86_64 root=UUID=3e03df59-47e7-4419-9d7a-a5ad2d0f2493 ro rootflags=subvol=root rhgb quiet

* Desktop(s) Running (ps -eo comm= | grep -E '(gnome-session|startkde|startactive|xfce.?-session|fluxbox|blackbox|hackedbox|ratpoison|enlightenment|icewm-session|od-session|wmaker|wmx|openbox-lxde|openbox-gnome-session|openbox-kde-session|mwm|e16|fvwm|xmonad|sugar-session|mate-session|lxqt-session|cinnamon|lxdm-session)' ):
     gnome-session-b
     gnome-session-c
     gnome-session-b

* Desktop(s) Installed (ls -m /usr/share/xsessions/ | sed 's/\.desktop//g' ):
     gnome-classic, gnome, gnome-xorg

Next, the symptoms:
These vary: sometimes the VM freezes for just a few seconds; other times, it locks up almost solid (except for mouse pointer), and won’t respond to keyboard input or SSH connections. Every time, there’s an almost identical (and not very enlightening) entry in the Problem Reporting tool:

System failure - Unexpected system error
Name: kernel-core
Version: 5.17.4-200.fc35.x86_64
First detected: between 6 days and 20 minutes ago
Reported: cannot be reported - the backtrace does not contain enough meaningful function frames to be reported…etc…
Problem details:

I also did journalctl --boot=-1 and captured that to a file, but when the VM froze again shortly after me doing that, the file hadn’t survived the restart, so I’m missing some data that might help. If this might yield some clues, then I’ll try again to get it - and if there’s somewhere I can upload it, let me know (it was a big file, so wouldn’t be practical to add it to this post!)

That’s as much potentially useful trouble-shooting info as I know how to extract. None of what I’ve looked at gives me any clear indication as to why this is happening, and what I can do to stop it. I’d very much appreciate the collective wisdom of this community in helping me get to the bottom of it, as it’s an annoying issue.

Many thanks in advance,

Angus

Hi all - could I bump this request for help? I’ve not seen any responses in the >three weeks since posting. Thank you!

Maybe a way to have a hint of where the problem is emanating from “at the time where it happens” is to pre-emptively log into that affected computer via SSH using another computer, run sudo journalctl -f to monitor all system logs in realtime, and see if anything gets shown (regardless of the ability to write the logs to disk) when the freeze happens later on?

I’ve been experiencing a lot of lockups/freezes since the past week with my AMD Radeon (but in my case SSH’ing in works); I wonder if your problem could be related, or not. As I haven’t seen people reporting my issue here in June this year, I created a new thread with my observations, just to be sure.