Since a couple days, my Fedora installation (on an HP laptop with Intel graphics), while working sometimes freezes. No key combination seems to work, the mouse pointer does not move.
What seems strange to me is that twice out of three episodes, I pressed the power keys an it went to sleep, and worked after resume. This never happened to me before: freeze was freeze, with no response at all.
When it happened there wasn’t animation on screen nor sound (neither a blinking cursor), so I cannot tell if it’s a input problem or a real freeze.
Can somebody help me to diagnose the problem? Something I can check after the resume?
This means the kernel hasn’t crashed, but there is a power management software issue or a hardware fault. Does the screen freeze or go black? Next time it happens, see if the or lights respond. Check for firmware updates – there has been a move away from vendor-specific power management towards more universal standards, but that can require firmware changes by vendors.
There are other ways to filter journalctl output. I would try to identify a boot “offset” where the problem occurred and see if the -p (priority) option identifies the issue. You can also try to find linux power management events with keywords like “power” and “sleep” with the -g (grep) option. Example:
% journalctl --no-hostname -b -1 -g sleep |cat
Aug 13 11:25:21 kernel: input: Sleep Button as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/LNXSYBUS:00/PNP0C0E:00/input/input0
Aug 13 11:25:21 kernel: ACPI: button: Sleep Button [SLPB]
Aug 13 11:25:22 kernel: ata1.00: Features: Trust Dev-Sleep NCQ-sndrcv
Aug 13 11:25:22 kernel: ahci 0000:00:17.0: port does not support device sleep
Aug 13 11:25:25 systemd-logind[900]: Watching system buttons on /dev/input/event0 (Sleep Button)
You should provide the output from running inxi -Fzxx in a terminal as pre-formatted text (use the </> button at the top of the text entry panel) to allow others with similar hardware and issues to find this topic.
Thank you very much. fwdupdtool does not update the firmware, and since the changelog only mentions security updates I don’t know if it’s worth to reinstall Windows to update the BIOS.
Also, my computer didn’t freeze in the meantime.
But maybe I discovered something: a “freeze” happened while using multitouch gesture on the touchpad: somehow, it didn’t register the release of a finger and seemed frozen until I put it back on and off. Maybe that’s what happened, with unwanted small touch?
I can’t tell from this why fwupdtool “does not update the firmware”. Does it not find BIOS updates? Does it find updates but won’t install them? The installation fail? On my system, some firmware updates are held in a “prepared/waiting” statue until some other updates arrive, so there can be dependency issues.
Most vendors have ways to install firmware updates without windows, usually as a bootable image intended to be put on a USB stick. On vendor-specific sites I have seen workarounds such as booting a Windows installer to update firmware.
Many security issues stem from bugs that can affect normal operation, so you should not ignore them.
This sounds feasible. Sometimes there are settings that help with such problems – Allow the touchpad to keep working while a keyboard button is pressed, which can be changed using Gnome settings. Unfortunately, Gnome Settings may only show the most commonly used options, and some misbahaviour is only seen on certain hardware. If you don’t find a setting that helps with your issue, try Gnome and vendor-specific forums.
Loading… [********* ]12:01:44.806 FuUsbDevice failed to parse platform BOS descriptor: failed to parse: no supported platform version: did not find magic
Loading… [************************************** ]
Devices with no available firmware updates:
• MZVLQ256HAJD-000H1
• System Firmware
• Unifying Receiver
Devices with the latest available firmware version:
• UEFI dbx
No updates available for remaining devices
I will look for Windows-less way to install the BIOS; HP seems to only provide a Windows exe (for my previous PC there was a FreeDOS bootable image but I dont’ find it).
Thank you for the help with multitouch, I will look into it.
HP does participate in the Linux firmware project. You should probably contact HP Support in case they just need prompting to make the update available.