Hi, I've been having this problem with my system for like a week where it just locks up and has to be hard restarted. The screen freezes, input devices are unresponsive, bluetooth disconnects, sftp server stops etc. This can happen anytime; while I'm moving the mouse, in a game, while idling.. And the worst part is that when I check the journal afterwards there's absolutely nothing there. No errors, no coredumps, no other messages (from the freeze time)
I've run the aur malware checker and it's clean. I've also updated the system a couple times and it feels like the frequency of freezes only increased over time.
That makes me suspicious of a hardware failure, but I've had similarly strange problems before and every time it was a software problem. I've started a memtest (clean so far) but I'm not sure what else to do on that front. What component's failure would result in a freeze, but not a crash or any errors?
System is zen4 with nvidia graphics.
Anyone experiencing something similar? Are there new driver / system incompatibilities that I should know about? How would you debug this? Is there a way to figure out the origin of the freeze despite the empty journal?
Edit: Memtest passed 3 times. Now it's burned into the lcd screen 🥲😭 Edit: burn-in gone after color cycling
Edit 2: I think the problem is the bios settings after all. I had a -6 curve optimizer offset, and the freezing hasn't happened since I removed it. Silicon degrades over time, apparently.
Edit 3: Nope it froze again
Are you running low on memory? The system can appear to freeze when it runs low on memory as the kernel tries very hard to swap pages between ram and swap constantly.
Nope, plenty of memory and more than half empty too. But what you say does make sense to me, the last couple weeks I've also been getting momentary freezes when starting local LLMs, as if the scheduler was prioritizing transferring it to the GPU above all else.
Try reseating all your components, like ram, cpu, etc. maybe new thermal paste too.