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I am experiencing weird freeze of Ubuntu 20.04. I cannot move the cursor, audio stops and I have to hard reboot with the power button. I have a Dell Inspiron 15 7501 (+8GB ram installed by myself) since a month or so, and I installed Ubuntu 20.04 with Win10 Home in dual boot as soon as I received the laptop. Everything in Win10 works fine, and also on Ubuntu since yesterday. I have not installed anything in the past few days.

Initially It happened 3 times when having 1 Mozilla tab with Overleaf, some pdfs (2 or 3) and a python3 shell used as a calculator, running nothing. The fourth time I had 3 Mozilla tab and 1 pdf.

I already tried to increase the swap memory from 2Gb to 8Gb as suggested here Ubuntu 20.04 random freeze ups but it didn't work. I post here the link to the system log files retrieved with the command cat /var/log/syslog of the third and fourth freeze:

3rd - https://drive.google.com/file/d/14mukUNN1VoGJjiKXhw29WHauxNjkjspY/view?usp=sharing

4th - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CBTFliwg8RA96UpeMGsGuuJ3ZBKBdM73/view?usp=sharing

Sorry for the google drive link, I have no idea on how to share this kind of terminal output in a simple way.

Thank you for your help

Francesco

Edit as requested:

free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           15Gi       1,5Gi        12Gi       220Mi       1,4Gi        13Gi
Swap:         8,0Gi          0B       8,0Gi

sysctl vm.swappiness
vm.swappiness = 60

sudo lshw -C memory

PCI (sysfs)

  -firmware

       description: BIOS
       vendor: Dell Inc.
       physical id: 0
       version: 1.3.0
       date: 08/18/2020
       size: 1MiB
       capacity: 24MiB
       capabilities: pci pnp upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect edd int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb smartbattery biosbootspecification netboot uefi
  -cache:0
       description: L1 cache
       physical id: 700
       slot: L1 Cache
       size: 256KiB
       capacity: 256KiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=1
  -cache:1
       description: L2 cache
       physical id: 701
       slot: L2 Cache
       size: 1MiB
       capacity: 1MiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=2
  -cache:2
       description: L3 cache
       physical id: 702
       slot: L3 Cache
       size: 8MiB
       capacity: 8MiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=3
  -memory
       description: System Memory
       physical id: 1000
       slot: System board or motherboard
       size: 16GiB
     -bank:0
          description: SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 3200 MHz (0,3 ns)
          vendor: 000000003180
          physical id: 0
          serial: 00000000
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 8GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 3200MHz (0.3ns)
     -bank:1
          description: SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 3200 MHz (0,3 ns)
          product: CT8G4SFRA32A.C4FE
          vendor: 859B00000000
          physical id: 1
          serial: E3742A1E
          slot: DIMM B
          size: 8GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 3200MHz (0.3ns)
  -memory UNCLAIMED
       description: RAM memory
       product: Comet Lake PCH Shared SRAM
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 14.2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:14.2
       version: 00
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz (30.3ns)
       capabilities: pm cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: iomemory:600-5ff iomemory:600-5ff memory:6023120000-6023121fff memory:6023128000-6023128fff

grep -i swap /etc/fstab
/swapfile                                 none            swap    sw              0       0

ls -al /var/crash
totale 4028
drwxrwsrwt  2 root      whoopsie    4096 nov 24 18:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root      root        4096 lug 31 18:35 ..
-rw-r-----  1 francesco whoopsie 4108506 nov 24 18:45 _usr_bin_seahorse.1000.crash
-rw-r--r--  1 francesco whoopsie       0 nov 24 18:45 _usr_bin_seahorse.1000.upload
-rw-------  1 whoopsie  whoopsie      37 nov 24 18:45 _usr_bin_seahorse.1000.uploaded

sudo dmidecode -s bios-version
1.3.0
F. Addari
  • 108
  • Edit your question and show me free -h and sysctl vm.swappiness and sudo lshw -C memory and grep -i swap /etc/fstab and ls -al /var/crash and sudo dmidecode -s bios-version. Start comments to me with @heynnema or I'll miss them. – heynnema Nov 24 '20 at 17:10
  • @heynnema Edited as requested! – F. Addari Nov 24 '20 at 17:51
  • @heynnema Well, It keeps freezing sometimes.. I may try to do a fresh re-install or trying another distro.. – F. Addari Nov 28 '20 at 14:59
  • Is this a new Dell laptop? Did it come with 20.04 installed? You might try updating to 20.10. If it is a new laptop, have you contacted Dell Support yet? You've updated the BIOS and run memtest, correct? Have you overclocked your CPU or RAM? – heynnema Nov 28 '20 at 15:10
  • @heynnema Yes, It is a new Dell laptop and I installed 20.04 by myself, dual boot with the Win10 installation. I have not overclocked anything. Yes, I have updated the bios and run the full memtest, got 4/4. – F. Addari Nov 28 '20 at 15:19
  • Update to 20.10 and see if that helps. Report back. – heynnema Nov 28 '20 at 15:21
  • Status please... – heynnema Dec 03 '20 at 01:46
  • @heynnema I wanted to be sure before reporting back. I tried 20.10 in one day, It crashed again. Then I changed to Pop_Os!20.04 LTS, from a fresh install. I'm using it since 4 days and It is not crashing, until now. Let's see how it behaves in the long run, because Ubuntu 20.04 was flawless for a month or so. – F. Addari Dec 03 '20 at 18:28
  • @F.Addari how is it 5 month on? – SDS0 Apr 06 '21 at 15:47
  • 1
    @SDS0 Perfectly fine! It has never crashed again. – F. Addari Apr 07 '21 at 17:48
  • Hi @F.Addari, therefore for you the solution was to install an OS from scratch? Could you be more specific on what you have done? I am experiencing the same problem. Could you also tell me: 1) did you have an external monitor connected while having this problem? 2) which kernel version of Ubuntu 20.04 do you have now (and you had while experiencing the problem)? – desmond13 Oct 05 '21 at 11:40
  • @desmond13 Unfortunately I've recently moved to Win10 + WSL due to some work needings. In any case, in order to solve freezing in Ubuntu 20.04 the solution was to install from scratch Pop!_OS 20.04, which is an Ubuntu-based distro by System76 developers. They have a native support for Nvidia external graphics cards. I guess indeed the problem was related to that.

    To answer your questions:

    1. I had no external monitors connected, but when I had Pop!_OS external monitor worked just fine.
    2. Since I moved to Win10 I don't remember the kernel, sorry for that
     – F. Addari Oct 05 '21 at 14:39
  • @F.Addari, thanks for the quick answer, I appreciate it. I cannot go now to Pop!_OS but I gave a try to upgrading NVIDIA drivers and I have no freezing for some hours (~3) now. – desmond13 Oct 05 '21 at 15:29

1 Answers1

0

BIOS

Dell Inspiron 15 7501

You have BIOS 1.3.0.

There's a newer BIOS available, version 1.4.1, dated Sept 30, 2020, and can be downloaded here.

Note: Verify that I have the correct web page for your model #.

Note: Have good backups before updating the BIOS.

memory

Go to https://www.memtest86.com/ and download/run their free memtest to test your memory. Get at least one complete pass of all the 4/4 tests to confirm good memory. This may take many hours to complete.

heynnema
  • 70,711
  • Alright, I just finished BIOS update. I will have some time to do the memory test during weekend. Let's see how it behaves in the meantime. I will keep the discussion updated. – F. Addari Nov 24 '20 at 18:52
  • The freeze happened again, so I did the memory test and it was fine (4/4). I was using Nouveau drivers and hybrid graphics. I'm switched to proprietary drivers and I am now only using the dedicated graphic card. A colleague of mine had problems with Intel integrated graphics. Let's see how it goes. – F. Addari Nov 25 '20 at 17:58
  • @F.Addari Status please... – heynnema Dec 05 '20 at 15:53
  • I replyed yesterday under the question. I report the reply also here.. " wanted to be sure before reporting back. I tried 20.10 in one day, It crashed again. Then I changed to Pop_Os!20.04 LTS, from a fresh install. I'm using it since 4 days and It is not crashing, until now. Let's see how it behaves in the long run, because Ubuntu 20.04 was flawless for a month or so. " – F. Addari Dec 05 '20 at 17:34
  • @F.Addari Sorry I missed your previous update. I'm glad things are working for you. – heynnema Dec 05 '20 at 18:00