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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Various distros across different families freezing when doing package manager updates (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi All. I'm having an issue that I am hoping I can get some help with.

I have been using linux on this particular laptop for over a year now, and for the past 6 or so months (right around the time I upgraded to Plasma 6, but I think it is just a coincidence) about 50% of the time, when I update all my packages via package manager, the whole system freezes. Like, hard freezes. Waiting any amount of time won't get me out of it. I have to hold the power button to power it down. I can't use ctrl+alt+F3 or whatever to get another TTY. Mouse doesn't move. Nothing works.

It originally happened with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on btrfs. I thought maybe it was btrfs, so I reinstalled with ext4. Same issue. I tried Manjaro. Same issue. I tried EndeavourOS (wasn't really expecting different behavior at this point). Same issue.

Now I am thinking, what could cause an issue like this? Well, a package manager update just is a ton of file I/O operations, right? Could I have bad RAM and that is getting written to disk? Well, I did a memtest today and it came back perfect. So now I'm thinking it might be the SSD, but I'm not even sure how to check that.

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on or what I should do to fix it or debug it?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

sounds like maaaaybe too little ram and no swap? what is your ram size and do you have any swap or zram enabled? i kinda doubt it because multiple distros should have a swap space or zram on by default on a fresh install but maybe not or you explicitly chose not to and it's running out of memory.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Even then the recent LRU swap changes have largely eliminated pathological swap behavior cascading into an unusable system state. Those changes went in like 2y ago and should have been picked up by most distros by now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I have 16GB of RAM and 16GB of swap as a swap partition. Though I have also tried a 16GB swapfile and saw no difference. I don't know about zram.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

If you haven't intentionally setup zram swap you're almost certainly not using it.