I have assembled my desktop PC about 2 years ago. It’s fairly beefy (AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 16-Core Processor, 128Go RAM, nVidia RTX 3080 Ti). It’s running debian stable.
Once in a while (not that often, but like every 2 weeks or so), seemingly at random times, not especially under heavy loads, the system crash and freeze, irresponsive to even the linux sysrq magic keys. I never manage to find what was the cause. One interesting fact is that when it happens, for some reason it seems to “freeze my network” too, ie, other (ethernet) devices on my local network have no connectivity anymore. They’re all connected to the same router, but not through this crashing PC. Connectivity comes back as soon as I force shutdown the crashing PC.
What can cause this and how could I fix these freezes?
Your network card is hammering the network with packets and not taking a break. It doesn’t give the rest of they network a chance to talk.
If this was a windows machine, I would start by reinstalling the network driver, but I don’t know Linux well enough to say.
Oh this would explain why it kills the connectivity of all ethernet-connected devices. The ethernet interface is the one on the mobo. Drivers are included by the linux kernel AFAIK. The problem persisted across 2 debian versions so I am not sure re-installing drivers would do anything here. But thanks for the plausible explanation about the network issue!
You won’t have much luck with doing anything to the driver part of it, but you could try a custom kernel. There’s two advantages to that, one is it would be more recent than whatever kernel that Debian is using, and the second is the optimized networking stack, which speeds up processing of packets and improves the congestion handling algorithm. I’d recommend the Xanmod kernel for this: https://xanmod.org/
Alternatively, if we suspect your network is the culprit then the solution could be as simple a buying a new card and disabling the builtin one.
I can only offer some additional troubleshooting steps.
- Your network connection is fairly simple so I would suggest you take NM (NetworkManager) out of the equation and setup your network device manually to see if that eliminates your issue. This goes back to the comment (@despotic_machine) and log listing the p2p and wireless interfaces. Seems like the NM may be trying to setup your wifi interfaces. Though looking at the log you provided, it seems NM sees the wireless interface, identifies that it is not connected, and sets it to inactive. So, there may not be an issue. I had issues with NM many years ago on a laptop and preferred wicd; however, it seems that development has stalled on wicd. Regardless, I do not run NetworkManager at all on my desktop (just isc-dhcp-client and entry in /etc/networks/interfaces) since it is not roaming (plugged into a switch). It seems you don’t even need to uninstall anything, just setup the network manually and NM should leave the interface alone. If you want it to be clean, make sure NM is not running, or purge it from the system and setup your networking manually. The assumption of manual setup is based on the debian wiki:
https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager#Wired_Networks_are_Unmanaged
NOTE: Unless you know networking, this is probably going to take you down a networking rabbit hole, so glhf.
Some Debian references regarding networking and different configurations:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch05.en.html
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/sect.network-config
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If you want to stick with NM, it seems you can change the logging level to see if you get more details. I would check the man page or documentation for NM for instructions for debugging. I would expect that you can disable interfaces in NM to reduce the likelihood of some fringe case that is plaguing your setup. Since I don’t run NM, I can’t provide any detailed suggestions.
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More of a question but is the switch or router also the same device for the last 2 years? Is it possible that the network device is misbehaving and causing the desktop to lock up? This would feed into @0v0 request to wireshark/tcpdump from a laptop or other device connected to the router/switch to see what’s going on traffic wise.
Have you tried running tcpdump / wireshark on another device in the network when this happened?
Is it possible that the freeze you’re seeing on that machine is actually caused by a network failure, rather than the other way around?
I have encountered many times what appears to be a system freeze which is actually the result of background processes trying to access a network resource which no longer exists(eg, mounted a disk via VPN connection, but the VPN has dropped out)