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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Various distros across different families freezing when doing package manager updates (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi All. I'm having an issue that I am hoping I can get some help with.

I have been using linux on this particular laptop for over a year now, and for the past 6 or so months (right around the time I upgraded to Plasma 6, but I think it is just a coincidence) about 50% of the time, when I update all my packages via package manager, the whole system freezes. Like, hard freezes. Waiting any amount of time won't get me out of it. I have to hold the power button to power it down. I can't use ctrl+alt+F3 or whatever to get another TTY. Mouse doesn't move. Nothing works.

It originally happened with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on btrfs. I thought maybe it was btrfs, so I reinstalled with ext4. Same issue. I tried Manjaro. Same issue. I tried EndeavourOS (wasn't really expecting different behavior at this point). Same issue.

Now I am thinking, what could cause an issue like this? Well, a package manager update just is a ton of file I/O operations, right? Could I have bad RAM and that is getting written to disk? Well, I did a memtest today and it came back perfect. So now I'm thinking it might be the SSD, but I'm not even sure how to check that.

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on or what I should do to fix it or debug it?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How long did you run the memtest for? Ideally it should run a couple of times, since just a single pass might not detect any errors.

But it's weird that it happens when you try to update. Could it maybe be related to your network hardware, either LAN or WiFi? If you're using WiFi, try LAN, or vice versa. Perhaps even a USB dongle, and disable the onboard network hardware completely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It did 4 passes by default. It took almost 3 hours to run on 16 GB of RAM.

It's possible there is an issue with the WiFi. I had lots of WiFi issues on this laptop when I used Windows (micro freezing when using typing into an SSH shell, and pings would drop at the same time), but since switching to Linux, those went away. I'll definitely keep that in mind. I'll try using wired network if the issues come back after swapping SSDs.