System Freezes, only mouse cursor works

[stillmattwest]

Distribution (run cat /etc/os-release): NAME="Pop!_OS" VERSION="20.04 LTS" ID=pop ID_LIKE="ubuntu debian" PRETTY_NAME="Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS" VERSION_ID="20.04" HOME_URL="https://system76.com/pop" SUPPORT_URL="http://support.system76.com" BUG_REPORT_URL="https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues" PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://system76.com/privacy" VERSION_CODENAME=focal UBUNTU_CODENAME=focal LOGO=distributor-logo-pop-os

Related Application and/or Package Version (run apt policy $PACKAGE NAME): None

Issue/Bug Description:

EDIT - 06/01/2020 - I have steps to reproduce this problem, which may be related to Timeshift. Occasionally, Timeshift will not close properly and it's icon will get stuck on the dock. If I then right-click that icon, the system freezes. I was able to repeat this pattern three times to confirm it.

I have Pop_OS 20.04 installed on two separate machines: a Dell XPS 15 9560 and a Dell Optiplex 9020. Both have Nvidia video cards but the XPS 15 is using only integrated graphics. (output above is from XPS)

On both systems, Pop OS just randomly freezes. I haven't been able to come up with steps to recreate the bug but it is rare that I can use either machine for more than two hours without it locking up.

When the system locks the mouse cursor will still move but I can't click on anything. Keyboard is also locked. Only a hard reset works to unlock it.

Using Gnome 3.36.2 if that helps.

Steps to reproduce (if you know): Wait for Timeshift (possible other apps) to fail to close, leaving their icon on the dock. Right-click on icon to freeze the system.

Expected behavior: Not freezing

Other Notes:

[stillmattwest]

I should add that I have desktop icons disabled

[majksner]

I have similar issue. Can you try to press CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F1, F2, F3 and see if you get terminal prompt or new login screen? If so then I have exactly the same issue on a completely different hardware configuration.

[stillmattwest]

@majksner as far as I have been able to tell the keyboard is completely locked but I haven't tried that combination. Next time I see the problem I'll give it a shot.

[majksner]

@stillmattwest It is unless you press that key combination which will take you to the command prompt to login again. From there keyboard works for me but there isn’t much you can do except you can reboot which in my case sometimes doesn’t fix the issue. I’ve eventually settled with Ubuntu where I don’t have any of those issues.

[stillmattwest]

@majksner I was able to try your keyboard combination and it works like you describe. Good to have an option other than a hard reset at least.

I was also able to re-create this bug (see above.) It seems to have something to do with an app not closing correctly and leaving its icon on the dock. Right-clicking that icon will freeze the system.

[ajcool2k]

Same problem. I'm running an xps 15 (9570) with nvidia as well. Getting the freeze when click on an app icon in the dock that should have been closed but is still indicated as running.

[majksner]

I also believe this is not related to the graphic card, I have AMD Ryzen 3400G with integrated graphics.

[stillmattwest]

Just a little more detail on this bug: today I had a Steam game fail to close correctly, leaving the icon on the dock. I was able to reproduce the bug again whereas before I had only had a chance to try it with Timeshift. Left-clicking the "bad" icon did not freeze the system, only right-clicking it did. The keyboard trick described above still worked to get me out to the login screen.

One other detail: When I saw the "bad" icon appear I went into System Monitor and killed the process, which was listed three times. This removed the process from System Monitor but left the icon on the dock.

In general, Pop OS is running great on my system. This is the only crashing bug I've found so far.

[majksner]

Anyone using dash to panel or dash to dock extensions? If so try uninstalling those and see if problem occurs again.

[stillmattwest]

I do have dash-to-dock enabled but I've no plans to uninstall it as it would be too disruptive to my workflow.

[Taxick]

Hi!

I have the same problem! I'm running popos 20.04!

My pc freezes when I right-click on the dock! BTW, I'm using "dash-to-dock"

Another info, When the pc freezes i can go to the login screen by click: CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F1

I hope for a fix soon!

EDIT.

I have tried to uninstall "dash-to-dock" - And now the "normal" dock working fine...

I can right-click on the icons and works fine

But I really like the dash-to-dock - Hope there is a fix!

Regards

Thomas

[majksner]

There is an issue open in dash-to-dock repository. micheleg/dash-to-dock#1247

I think this one can be closed.

[stillmattwest]

Bummer, I hope Gnome gets a fix in, I'll just live with the bug until then I guess...

[mumair149]

The same thing happens to me as soon as i log into the system. I can't even use anything. And I've reinstalled the whole OS 3 times. I've just made the switch from windows to linux and kinda sad and disappointed that it's not going as smooth as i hoped. Anyways, is there any fix for this?

[MatijaTurcic]

I had (what I think is) the same thing happen to me. What worked for me was Ctrl+Alt+SUPER+F3 which brought me to a terminal where I log in and run the command reboot

[DaveParr]

I have the same problem, but not using dash to dock?

[darman96]

Same Problem also not using Dash to dock. Anyone made some progress on this so far?

[vsht]

Although not a Pop!_OS user (I run Fedora), I've run into this issue numerous times (Gnome 3.36.9). Switching from GDM to sddm significantly reduced the number of freezes for me, but they still occur from time to time (perhaps once in 3-4 weeks or so).

One thing I observed, is that for some strange reason when switching to the terminal via Ctrl+Alt+Fx during a freeze, I could not use sudo or restart the shell: these commands would simply freeze the terminal indefinitely.

So to be prepared for the next freeze, I deliberately assigned a password to root, so that I could become the superuser without sudo. This was about a month ago. Today I again had a sudden freeze of this type (mouse cursor moving, everything else frozen) and so I switched to the terminal Ctrl+Alt+F3, and issued

su
killall -HUP gnome-shell

Surprisingly, this way I managed to unfreeze the shell! Firefox and several evince windows crashed, but all my other open programs remained alive.

Not sure if this workaround is applicable to every kind of these mouse-moving-freezes, but I just wanted to share this piece of information. Hope it helps.

[fnl]

I too have that issue; Massively annoying, as it is frequent enough to make the laptop kind of unusable. I would love to hear of a way to diagnose it!

[vsht]

At the end of the day I managed to narrow it down to some network issues related to Realtek chips:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198931

However, I'm not sure if it is also relevant to other people. Obviously, there may be different reasons that render Gnome Shell into this sort of frozen state.

[fnl]

On my side, I uninstalled Timeshift, and since then do not seem to be able to reproduce the issue any longer.

[jonje]

I am having the same issue as mentioned above. My cursor can move around but no key presses are working except CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F3 does take me to a terminal. Looking under top the one process that was using 100% CPU was systemd_journald. The freeze happened when I opened a new project in Intellij. This is running on a System 76 Gazelle Intell I7-10870H with 32 GB of ram.

[resaba-kaypee]

OS: Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS x86_64 Host: Aspire A315-41G V1.18 Kernel: 5.11.0-7633-generic Uptime: 3 mins Packages: 1885 (dpkg), 17 (flatpak) Shell: bash 5.0.17 Resolution: 1920x1080 DE: GNOME WM: Mutter WM Theme: Pop Theme: Pop-dark [GTK2/3] Icons: Yaru [GTK2/3] Terminal: gnome-terminal CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2500U with Radeon Ve GPU: AMD ATI Radeon R7 M260/M265 / M3 GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Vega Series / Rad Memory: 1660MiB / 6909MiB

In my case freezing occurs when I am connected to the internet if I am browsing or not, also when opening and closing Google Chrome browser. Hardware acceleration is enabled on both Firefox and Chrome because if it is disabled I get this weird glitch/artifact on screen.

[resaba-kaypee]

Opening Google Chrome browser freezes the entire system for some unknown reason CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F3 does not work for me.

UPDATE: Today Sept 26

It froze again while browsing the internet. Upon reboot I have found this message in system log. These are just part of the message. Sep 26 19:33:58 the time if freezes and Sep 26 19:35:01 I rebooted. Again the keyboard is locked only mouse can move and there is nothing I can do but to do a hard reset.

Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079785] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: [gfxhub0] retry page fault (src_id:0 ring:0 vmid:3 pasid:32773, for process Xorg pid 6442 thread Xorg:cs0 pid 6466) Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079790] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: in page starting at address 0x800105a34000 from client 27 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079799] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: VM_L2_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS:0x00301031 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079802] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: Faulty UTCL2 client ID: TCP (0x8) Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079805] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: MORE_FAULTS: 0x1 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079807] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: WALKER_ERROR: 0x0 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079810] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: PERMISSION_FAULTS: 0x3 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079813] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: MAPPING_ERROR: 0x0 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.079815] amdgpu 0000:04:00.0: amdgpu: RW: 0x0 Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen kernel: [ 641.131928] [drm:amdgpu_job_timedout [amdgpu]] ERROR ring gfx timeout, but soft recovered Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen gsd-media-keys[9363]: [GFX1-]: GFX: RenderThread detected a device reset in PostUpdate Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen gnome-shell[6665]: JS WARNING: [resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/popupMenu.js 572]: reference to undefined property "_delegate" Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen gnome-shell[6665]: JS WARNING: [resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/popupMenu.js 22]: reference to undefined property "_delegate" Sep 26 19:33:58 ryzen gnome-shell[6665]: JS WARNING: [resource:///org/gnome/shell/ui/popupMenu.js 660]: reference to undefined property "_delegate" Sep 26 19:35:01 ryzen CRON[25969]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)

[ghost]

Does pressing the Super key while in this kind of Frozen state unfreeze the system? I am able to get out of the freeze by pressing Super key and getting into the Activities overview on Ubuntu, Fedora and Manjaro. Not sure about Popos tho.

[jprobichaud]

I'm also hitting this very behavior since today's update (2022-11-21). I had no such issues before. I managed to ssh to my machine from another computer and kill gnome-shell, which somewhat restored the shell : I can switch app with alt-tab, and the mouse almost works within one application (but not to switch app or switch tabs in chrome)

[Jdogzz]

Just hit this bug this morning, first time since my install a few months ago. Screen was locked, typed in my password and hit enter, and nothing changed. The interface was frozen on the login interface (with my password typed in the box). Things were still clickable from the actual desktop as the cursor would change form depending on what I hovered over, and I had a media player that started and stopped on one monitor when I clicked. Hitting CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F1 switched to a login interface that also froze when I logged in, and hitting CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F3 opened a terminal prompt where I could successfully get the computer to reboot.

[VampiricAlien]

Just hit this bug this morning, first time since my install a few months ago. Screen was locked, typed in my password and hit enter, and nothing changed. The interface was frozen on the login interface (with my password typed in the box). Things were still clickable from the actual desktop as the cursor would change form depending on what I hovered over, and I had a media player that started and stopped on one monitor when I clicked. Hitting CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F1 switched to a login interface that also froze when I logged in, and hitting CTRL + ALT + SUPER + F3 opened a terminal prompt where I could successfully get the computer to reboot.

@Jdogzz I've had this issue so many times, last night it happened again, closed laptop lid, 5 hours later opened it and still frozen. If you can get to the login terminal, kill Gome-shell. once it restarts (Gome-shell not pc) it should work again. Works for me IF i can get it to lock.

[kamauthomas]

So no solution to this date??

[luckyklyist]

Any solution to this issue ? It's happening so frequently .

[VampiricAlien]

I find when this starts to happen is to lock the laptop so the lock screen comes up then kill gnome from the command line.

[kamauthomas]

The issue is rampant on parrot os, whenever I connect it to the Internet after some time of browsing it freezes....

[chiliphrosting]

This issue gradually worsened for me and only started happening about a week and a half ago. Only today it froze 4 times or so (if I remember correctly). I've already ruled out the possibility that the root cause was from chromium. It could be from using a VM but this is the first times its happened to me and the VMs are typically only 250-500MB. The Alt + Sysrq (Print Screen) + REISUB helped when going to the log screen but does not resolve the issue. reference: https://askubuntu.com/questions/11002/alt-sysrq-reisub-doesnt-reboot-my-laptop

[chiliphrosting]

After dealing with this for nearly 2 weeks, I may have found the solution to this painful issue:

ps -ef | grep gnome
killall -9 /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session

I've also made a repo of it as well freezing desktop repo.

[VampiricAlien]

@chiliphrosting This happens to me a lot (less then 10 minutes ago) if I am able to get to a login screen to use the command killall -SIGQUIT gnome-shell it becomes unfrozen. I think Ubuntu would kill anything that was hogging CPU or RAM too much.

And sometimes it's the app centre slowing down the computer.

I think the solution is to use another OS.

[chiliphrosting]

@VampiricAlien the killall gnome-shell didn’t work for me all the time where I was forced to reboot. The gdm-x-session worked better getting back to log screen. I had no issues with ram, swap, or the harddrive. Running systemctl status gdm3 shows an error and I am not quite sure the root cause yet. I am definitely leaning that its xorg and gnome issue and not necessarily the os itself because the issue happens with a distribution thats shipped with gnome and xorg. The problem arises intermittently but a lot so i have it running as a cron job, at least for now so that if it locks up I dont have to ssh and just need to log back in. Its annoying, but its a good temporary solution.

[VampiricAlien]

gdn3 gives this error

gkr-pam: unable to locate daemon control file

GLib: Source ID 6047 was not found when attempting to remove it

It may not directly be OS but the OS could step in and restart the GUI or stop apps from taking too much resources?

[chiliphrosting]

@VampiricAlien this is the error when the freeze starts:

DATE-TIME USER kernel: [ num ] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* [CRTC:131:pipe B] flip_done timed out
DATE-TIME USER /usr/libexec/gdm-x-session[ num ]: (II) event8  - Logitech Trackball: SYN_DROPPED event - some input events have been lost.
DATE-TIME USER kernel: [ num ] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* flip_done timed out
DATE-TIME USER kernel: [ num ] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* [CRTC:131:pipe B] commit wait timed out

[leviport]

https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/959#issuecomment-1686540379

[chiliphrosting]

Here is a temporary solution that I am also testing out:

1. After initial log in:
2. sudo systemctl restart gdm3
3. Log back in.

[chiliphrosting]

Here is a temporary solution that I am also testing out:

1. After initial log in:
2. sudo systemctl restart gdm3
3. Log back in.

@VampiricAlien

[kamauthomas]

Here is a temporary solution that I am also testing out:

1. After initial log in:
2. sudo systemctl restart gdm3
3. Log back in.

@VampiricAlien

Doesn't work actually mine doesn't have gdm3

[chiliphrosting]

@kamauthomas you have to determine what your desktop manager is, typically based on what distribution you have.

[chiliphrosting]

Disconnecting my hdmi monitor solved the issue but now I don't have a second monitor :disappointed:.

[LuckxSz]

Any solution to this issue ? It's happening so frequently . I need help too