I had 2 system freezes recently, upon boot the bug report says it’s kernel.
There is no sysrq key on the laptop keyboard, Ctrl+Alt+Del and power button don’t work.
I had to long press power button to force poweroff, I wonder if doing this could be risky?
On my Dell Inspiron I use sysreq as follows:
CTL+ALT tap PrtScr release CTL [command keys, REISUB]
On my other Inspiron I use Fn instead of CTL
It works very well.
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A “freeze” can be a kernel fault or just the graphics subsystem. If it is just graphics, CapsLock light should respond, and should respond to pings from another system. Filesystems should be in good order. If you can login with ssh you can capture information document the failure.
If the kernel has stopped, filesystems can be damaged. Shutting down with a long press of the power button could damage filesystems if the problem was in the display system, so it is best to be sure the system is completely non-responsive.
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Seems to be Firefox. Every time i froze I was using Firefox, there are plenty of posts online.
Froze again today, Caps Lock worked but unfortunately SSH is disabled by default. Can’t believe I’m opening up SSH for this reason…
I tried multiple hidden SysRq combinations found online but none worked. Seems my potato laptop just doesn’t have SysRq.
Kinda unfair that an application can just crash the desktop like this.
Also kinda unfortunate that there is no more convenient way of recovery. IIRC on Windows either Ctrl+Alt+Del works, or Windows automatically kills the frozen desktop and launches a new one, or a power button press reboots the system.
EDIT:
Nope, just got a hard freeze yesterday on Win 11 while Chrome is open. Nothing worked as well. Caps Lock was dead.
These freezes really makes me doubt myself, but I hardly mess with the systems (at least Fedora). Though the freezing on Fedora seems to have stopped recently.
You are using Fedora, where users are often the first to discover bugs. Ssh access allows you to see details of a problem that might otherwise be lost. Don’t jump the conclusion that Firefox is at fault – GUI crashes are usually down to display drivers that have direct access to the kernel. Firefox is usually run with user privileges.
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