Issues with Lunar Lake CPU Causing Fedora 44 to Completely Freeze

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1

Hey guys! I’m running into an issue on a newly-purchased Dell 14 Plus laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 7 256V (Lunar Lake) running Fedora 44. To explain, the entire system completely and randomly freezes up every once in a while (roughly one or two times in a period of two days). The mouse cursor stops moving, and the keyboard becomes unresponsive, with the only way to fix it being hard rebooting the system by holding down the power button. For context, the freezes have happened both while gaming and casual browsing (granted less frequently while browsing).

If it helps, here are my system specs and details:

  • Device: Dell 14 Plus
  • CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 256V (Integrated Intel Arc 140V Graphics)
  • RAM: 16 GB (LPDDR5X @ 8533 MT/s)
  • OS: Fedora Linux 44 (GNOME)
  • Kernel: 7.1.3-200.fc44.x86_64

Also, I don’t have journalctl logs because it’s a hard freeze and it doesn’t always have time to write to the disk before the crash. I also found an open bug report on Intel’s Linux tracker highlighting a (somewhat?) similar issue with a workaround relating to disabling CPU 5, but I don’t know if that’s safe to tinker with. Here’s the link: Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 7 258V): kernel NULL pointer dereference in cpuidle_enter_state on CPU 5 (LP E-core) · Issue #83 · intel/linux-intel-lts · GitHub.

Could anyone help me in identifying if this a kernel-level issue, or something specific to my machine? Please let me know if there’s anything else required from my side to help me with this. Thank you for the help!

2

go for it. run the echo command to disable cpu 5 and see if that helps. It’s safe to do. Just don’t try to bring cpu 5 back online. A reboot will do that.

3

Okay, I just did that–I’ll try doing the same for the next few days and see if this actually solves the problem. If this works, I’m guessing it’s a kernel level problem. Also, do you know if this is a widely documented problem?

5

UPDATE: The problem hadn’t occurred for the past 3 days (i.e., when I last replied on the post), but the same system freeze just happened while gaming. For context, I had run the echo command already to disable CPU 5. Does this mean that CPU 5 idling is not the point of error?