Some Weird Issues

Ask Fedora
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1

I have two main issues on Fedora.

  1. Sometimes the system takes a long time to shut down. When I press “Esc” to see what’s happening, it seems that user@1000.service is causing the delay. I’m not sure what this service does or why it occasionally slows down the shutdown process.

  2. The second issue is rare and not reproducible. Occasionally, the desktop freezes completely and the only way to recover is a hard shutdown using the power button. It just happens randomly.

Do you have any ideas about these?

2

This is the service that holds all the services and apps that you run when you logged in.

Something you use is refusing to shutdown. There will be logs explaining what failed to shutdown in either the user journal or the system journal.

If you want to speed up the shutdown then you can change the default timeout.

For example this is what I configured on my desktop to speed up shutdown/reboot.

$ cat /etc/systemd/user.conf.d/10-barry.conf
[Manager]
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=15s

$ cat /etc/systemd/system.conf.d/10-barry.conf
[Manager]
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=20s

Do you have another system that you could use to try and ssh into the frozen system? You can use any system that supports ssh, including Windows.

If so ssh into it and look at dmesg and logs. You can also do a controlled shutdown/reboot.

You will need to setup sshd for this to work, if it is not already setup.

sudo systemctl enable --now sshd
3

Hello, thanks for your response.

It actually happens quite frequently. I’m really curious about what’s causing it. I’ll definitely check the logs next time.

Unfortunately, I only have this machine. Interestingly, I experienced the same freezing issue back when I was using Ubuntu as well. I’m almost certain it’s related to GNOME, but I have no idea what’s triggering it.

4

Try to switch to a console, use Alt-Ctrl-F3.
Does that bring up a login prompt?

5

That is often a signature of hardware problems. Some vendors provide hardware test programs, and you should check the health of the mass storage device. If you have external devices connected you should try running the system with the minimum number of external devices.

6

Normally yes it is bring a login prompt but frozen system does not respond anything. Including tty screen.

7

I don’t believe this is a hardware issue; if it were, the freezes would happen more often, but as I mentioned, they’re infrequent but still annoying. Moreover, I’ve used Windows on the same machine without experiencing any freezing at all.

8

My work was hit hard by the Capacitor Plague at the turn of the century. Most of the desktops were from a mass purchase, but our other brands were also affected. With dual boot systems, linux was blamed for crashes because Windows was working. It was easy to spot the bulges on failed capacitors. In our use case, Linux systems were being pushed harder running long batch jobs, so not surprising the power supply issues would affect linux first. Capacitors are still failing in older systems. A Nvidia card I bought in 2007 failed in 2018.

9

I had this problem with the recents kernel ans systemd updates (for ~ 1 month). When the system can’t shutdown, I examine which process is blocking the shutdown process with systemd-inhibit --list.

If cinnamon is listed, I use cinnamon on workstation with Xorg, I shutdown the system with systemctl poweroff -i

Kernel 6.14.11 was very prone to that, such is 6.12.37-longterm. Haven’t tested any of the 6.15 branch.

6.12.37-longterm, particularly, is problematic. No shutdown every time I use the computer. I’m retesting 6.12.35-longterm today to see whether or not it’s plagued with this issue but for the last 8 days, it was fine, until I upgraded saturday.