Random freezes that seem related to x11

Hi

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve experienced random freeze about once per day. When this occurs:

  • The entire screen is frozen.
  • Cannot even move the mouse pointer
  • Cannot switch to another tty Using Ctrl+Alt+F3
  • It’s possible to connect on the affected computer using SSH on another computer
  • Using htop using SSH shows a process related to x11 using 100% of 1 CPU
  • The affected x11 process doesn’t respond to SIGTERM or SIGINT (using htop)
  • Using SIGKILL does shut down the x11 process, and the CPU usage returns to normal, but the screen remains frozen.
  • Using sudo reboot reboots the computer but it takes like 2 minutes before it restarts (normally it takes less than 10 seconds)

The freeze don’t seem related to an app in particular. I remember them happening while using Shotcut, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc…

My setup:

  • Fedora 37
  • The computer is an Alienware X51 R2 with a Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics card.
  • nvidia drivers are installed
  • I’m dual booting. The other OS is Windows 10.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think of noting the full name of the x11 process. I’ll update this post when the next freeze occurs.

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