Hi everyone,
ever since I switched to Arch about two months ago, most applications segfault multiple times a day. There doesn't seem to be any pattern for the crashes, sometimes it's even happening while idling (e.g. reading a news article).
Things I've tried without any luck so far:
- Running Firefox in safe-mode without any extensions
- Switching from regular to LTS kernel
- Disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox
- Change RAM speed and timings
- Run Memtest successfully
- Replace entire RAM with a new certified kit
- Use only a single RAM slot
- Apply Ryzen fixes (iommu=soft, limit c-states)
- Use only a single CPU core (maxcpus=1)
- Downgrade Nvidia driver to 535xx
- Use Nouveau instead of the nvidia driver
- Use Openbox instead of KDE
- Disable zswap and THP
Here's full journalctl from a day where both Spotify and Firefox crashed at the end, a few seconds after each other:
Some more info about my system:
- Ryzen 5 3600X
- MSI B450M PRO-VDH Max
- 32GB RAM @ 3200MHz
- Geforce RTX 2070 SUPER (using nvidia-dkms)
- Plasma 5.27.10 on X11
I'm pretty sure that it's not hardware related, because I've booted up a Debian 12 live image where everything ran for several hours without a crash. But it seems to be Arch related, as I also booted up a fresh EndeavourOS live image (so basically Arch), where applications also randomly segfaulted. Any idea why everything works fine on Debian but not on Arch? Debian uses the 6.1 kernel, which I already tried, so that's not it.
Let me know if you need any more information that might help solve this issue. Thanks!
Edit [solved]: It looks like disabling PBO in the UEFI/BIOS did the trick. The strange thing is, after enabling it again, it's still not crashing again. Someone suspected that the MoBo default/training settings were faulty, so I guess this was a very rare case here. That's probably why it took so long to find a solution. Thanks everyone for helping me out!
Make sure you have the latest firmware for your motherboard. This sounds like unstable voltages for memory, or an overly-aggressive PBO curve. Did you try disabling the XMP profile on the RAM, disabling PBO, and upping the voltages (within safe limits) of the SOC, DDR, and VDDP? You might find some useful info here[0] or here[1] if you intend to run your memory at 3200 MHz.
Motherboard firmware is up-to-date, and I've already tried disabling XMP. I'll give disabling PBO a try, thanks!
I don't necessarily have to run at 3200MHz, if it means that the system is finally stable. But since it's already crashing at the default 2133MHz, I suppose there's no use in playing with the voltages?
Try running a memtest, if it's not voltages it could be a faulty ram stick. I've had it where data gets written, but what is read is garbage, corrupted some pretty important files on my system when I ran an update and it used that faulty section for it's buffer.