System freeze related to `hdy_carousel_box`?

[lukors]

I'm sorry for this vague issue, but this seemed like the best place for it.

My system freezes at least ~2 times per day. In Pop!_OS that did not happen. I'm really enjoying elementary OS and really don't want to switch back, but I will have to unless I can fix this issue. So I'll try to give as much information as I can, and I'm hoping to get help from you to diagnose the issue so it can be fixed.

System info

Facts

• I can't press ctrl alt F2 to get a prompt after a freeze
• It wasn't freezing from the beginning, it started at some point, but I don't know when exactly.
• They happen when I'm not doing anything in particular, most recently I was on the phone and was just slightly moving my mouse cursor over my Signal window when it froze.
• They seem related to web rendering, I believe Signal uses web rendering, it has happened in Firefox often and in Chromium. I can't remember it happening in something other than a web rendered application, but I'll keep an eye out for it.
• It seems to not happen in Web, if that means anything, maybe uses other web rendering?
• I have stayed away as much as I can from doing anything non-standard, so staying away from .deb files and apt-get, and installing anything that is like "low level" in the system.
• I tried getting the System76 power management stuff working at one point to change the charge thresholds on my battery. I couldn't get it to work and I tried uninstalling all that since. I don't recall that being connected to the freezing, but could be.

/var/log/syslog output

I'm getting a huge block of these:

^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@^@

Don't know if that means anything. Those seem to be in the log right when the freeze happens.

Before that block of those, I often see a lot of this stuff:

Dec  7 13:40:01 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_position: assertion 'HDY_IS
_CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:01 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_n_pages: assertion 'HDY_IS_
CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:01 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_position: assertion 'HDY_IS
_CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:01 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_nth_child: assertion 'HDY_I
S_CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:01 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_scroll_to: assertion 'HDY_IS_CA
ROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:06 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_position: assertion 'HDY_IS
_CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:06 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_n_pages: assertion 'HDY_IS_
CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:06 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_position: assertion 'HDY_IS
_CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:06 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_get_nth_child: assertion 'HDY_I
S_CAROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed
Dec  7 13:40:06 lemp10 io.elementary.a[1880]: hdy_carousel_box_scroll_to: assertion 'HDY_IS_CA
ROUSEL_BOX (self)' failed

The most recent crash has 21 pages of that in my terminal before the ^@^@^@^@^@ stuff, starting at Dec 7 13:32:58 and ending there at Dec 7 13:40:06.

And that's all I've got.

I'm a pretty technical person and highly motivated to get rid of this freezing. Any help to further diagnose the issue or possible solutions is greatly appreciated.

[vjr]

Did you manually update your kernel to 5.15 ? If so can you try downgrade back to say 5.13 ?

[lukors]

I did not manually update my kernel. I'm guessing that happened when I uninstalled the System76 power management stuff, I assumed it would bring me back to the original kernel (not that I understood it would install a different kernel in the first place), but apparently it installed another one.

I'm assuming the latest kernel for elementary OS is 5.13?

Right after I posted this I randomly found a way to consistently reproduce the locking, which was to visit this website, adding a picture using the purple button, and then waiting less than a minute.

That freeze is no longer happening, and the website works as expected, so I think this solved my freezing issue! Many, many thanks to you @vjr! :pray: