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Hey there I am doing yet another edit with newly gathered information. So far there has been few responses here, so this will probably be the last one.

I am running a ThinkPad P14s with Ubuntu 20.04. Some times the machine freezes completely and I have to hard reset it.

I am almost sure this does not happen because I am running out of RAM or the machine getting to hot.

Of course I want to track the root of the problem, but I also want to learn more about how to approach these problems in general as I have little knowledge of Ubuntu and Linux in general. So what log file and setting should I look at? What am I looking for? Maybe there are also guides that you could link me to. Although I get overwhelmed by those quite fast. A similar question has been asked here (Tracking down a random freeze?) and /var/log/syslog is mentioned there but the question of what to look for was not answered.

I have gathered some additional information that hopefully can enable some one to help me.

Occurrences and graphics card

I am not 100% certain but I think the freezes occur exclusively when

  • watching a DvD / Blueray
  • streaming videos
  • during games

I changed what graphics card is used with prime-select [nvidia | intel]. But the freezes occur in both setups.

no REISUB

When a freeze occurs I cannot reboot the system with SysRq + R E I S U B. From what I understand that is not the case for "most" system crashes. Does that lead towards some possible problems more that towards others?

memtest

I tried to to do the steps here but holding Shift did not open GRUB. After some searching I found that I can change /etc/default/grub such that I have:

GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10

Now GRUB opens on every reboot, but there is no option memtest86+ available. I checked that /etc/grub.d/ contains the executable file 20_memtest86+ and I also checked all options under "advanced" in GRUB.

What else could I try in order to run memtest?

psensor

I do not think my problem comes from overheating. The last couple of freezes happened when my Laptop felt relatively cool. I use "psensor" to constantly track the temperature.

problems on reboot

This may or may not be related. I recently was trying to load a save game of some game but the game crashed every time. I decided to reboot the system to see if that helps but the reboot could not be completed! Instead the following was printed:

Virtual device wlp0s20f3 asks to queue paket!
sytemmd-shutdown[1]: Could not detach Dm /dev/dm-0: Device or resource busy
sytemmd-shutdown[1]: Failed to finalize DM devices, ignoring
sof-audio-pci 0000:00:1f.3: error: no reply expected, received 0x0
xhci_hcd 0000:2b:00.0: Host halt failed, -19

I had to hard reset after this. What does that mean?

Franz
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  • I second this problem, exactly the same happens to me. Also I notice the fan is working quite often on this laptop. – petroslamb Dec 10 '20 at 15:24
  • After rebooting, include messages from /var/log/syslog around the time the freeze occurs. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Jan 05 '21 at 19:34
  • I did a firmware upgrade and since then the problem seems to be gone. I cannot be sure since it was not easily reproduceable in the first place. IHowever, if the upgrade fixed the problem I would have been wuite unlucky since I did one just a few days after I got the laptop. – Franz Jan 19 '21 at 12:39
  • @petroslamb I have P14s with i7 1165G7 and experience exactly the same problem - excessive fan RPM(even in bios) and also freeze on Linux - 30s to 1 min after startup. Did you manage to fix it? If yes was it BIOS upgrade? Do you also have intel processor? – Alan May 06 '21 at 16:15
  • @Franz do you have intel or AMD CPU? Is your fan loud on Ubuntu? For me Ubuntu kept freezing so I installed W10 and checked BIOS version but is was already up to date. After installing all Lenovo drivers the fan slowed down a bit. One thing I noticed is that Lenovo's thermal paste is thick and dry so I changed for a new one - but this may be a separate issue. – Alan May 06 '21 at 16:22
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    @Alan I think my problem was/is very specific to my machine. The freezes are in fact gone but I keep having problems after resuming from standby. Very odd errors such as getting input/output errors when using, e.g. ps or alike. I think it related to my SSD. – Franz May 17 '21 at 13:43
  • @Alan, no I switched laptops – petroslamb Nov 09 '21 at 17:53
  • @petroslamb out of curiosity - what laptop did you get? Do you have any recommendations for similar-class machine? – Alan Nov 10 '21 at 08:55

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