I want to preface this saying I’m an absolute beginner with Linux and still working my way around it. While using my computer regularly (could just be browsing the internet while in discord vc or playing not very demanding games), the system will just freeze, and if there is some type of audio playing it will loop the last second of audio. I can’t move my mouse and I can’t open the terminal with Ctrl - Alt - Fx; the only way to fix this issue is by shutting down my computer and starting it again. Using journalctl in both regular and sudo mode doesn’t show any issue when it freezes. I’ve also tried running the command with the -f flag and that seems to stop it. It hasn’t crashed with that open, but since it happens randomly it’s probably luck.
I’ve also noticed that sometimes when booting up an error message saying RDSEED32 is broken. Disabling the corresponding CPUID bit will show; and that some people had similar freezes when having that error. I have added the clearcpuid=rdseed to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX in the grub.cfg file and the crash is still happening (I also checked the grub config when booting and the flag was there).
For reference, I’m dual booting Fedora with Windows 11 on my main drive and “testing the waters” in an older SSD that I had lying around. My specs are:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
Motherboard: TUF GAMING B650-PLUS
GPU: GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (running proprietary drivers, I’m 99% sure the nouveau drivers are not in use)
Fedora KDE 43
Linux Kernel version: 6.17.12-300.fc43.x86_64
Everything seems up to date and every check I’ve done for possible updates shows that none are needed
If I’m missing something please let me know as I’m still learning.
@Iñigo: [quote=“P G, post:2, topic:177536, username:pg-tips”]
Have you applied the recent BIOS update for this board?
[/quote]
It is generally best to update both system and vendor firmware when reporting problems – it easier for others with similar hardware to replicate your configuration without lengthy bask-and-forth exchanges.
Random freezes without journal entries are often symptoms of hardware failures. I would run memtest86+ overnight for several nights, and also check the S.M.A.R.T status of the drives.
It is generally best to update both system and vendor firmware when reporting problems – it easier for others with similar hardware to replicate your configuration without lengthy bask-and-forth exchanges.
Yeah I thought about it but since the ASUS BIOS update came only with an exe and a post somewhere said something along the lines of “Don’t update if it doesn’t say anything about Linux” I thought I didn’t need to update. Nevertheless, I booted up windows and updated the BIOS to the last available version; then updated whatever discover said to update and rebooted and the freeze happened almost immediately.
I tried running smartctl with both a short and a long test and none of them showed any errors. I’ll try running memtest tonight and report tomorrow but I’ll only be able to do a single test.
So I left memtest running for around 9h and after 10 tests it reported 0 errors. Yesterday I also noticed that it didn’t crash again even after putting it under heavy CPU load. If it happens again I’ll try to ssh through my phone and report again