Hi everyone,
ever since I switched to Arch about two months ago, most applications segfault multiple times a day. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern for the crashes, sometimes it’s even happening while idling (e.g. reading a news article).
Things I’ve tried without any luck so far:
- Running Firefox in safe-mode without any extensions
- Switching from regular to LTS kernel
- Disable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox
- Change RAM speed and timings
- Run Memtest successfully
- Replace entire RAM with a new certified kit
- Use only a single RAM slot
- Apply Ryzen fixes (iommu=soft, limit c-states)
- Use only a single CPU core (maxcpus=1)
- Downgrade Nvidia driver to 535xx
- Use Nouveau instead of the nvidia driver
- Use Openbox instead of KDE
- Disable zswap and THP
Here’s full journalctl from a day where both Spotify and Firefox crashed at the end, a few seconds after each other:
Some more info about my system:
- Ryzen 5 3600X
- MSI B450M PRO-VDH Max
- 32GB RAM @ 3200MHz
- Geforce RTX 2070 SUPER (using nvidia-dkms)
- Plasma 5.27.10 on X11
I’m pretty sure that it’s not hardware related, because I’ve booted up a Debian 12 live image where everything ran for several hours without a crash. But it seems to be Arch related, as I also booted up a fresh EndeavourOS live image (so basically Arch), where applications also randomly segfaulted. Any idea why everything works fine on Debian but not on Arch? Debian uses the 6.1 kernel, which I already tried, so that’s not it.
Let me know if you need any more information that might help solve this issue. Thanks!
Edit [solved]: It looks like disabling PBO in the UEFI/BIOS did the trick. The strange thing is, after enabling it again, it’s still not crashing again. Someone suspected that the MoBo default/training settings were faulty, so I guess this was a very rare case here. That’s probably why it took so long to find a solution. Thanks everyone for helping me out!
I had a 3700x that was doing that sort of thing. It seemed mostly random, but moving big files would crash it pretty often. It ran memtest86 for 3 days no problem. I replaced part by part, and it ended up being the CPU. I’d bought it second hand so it may have been abused.
But if it’s a faulty CPU, wouldn’t it also crash on Debian?
Wild guess, there could be differences in compilation optimization that expose this hypothetical proc defect on Arch but not on Debian. Try a day or two of mprime as some others suggested.
That wouldn’t necessarily reveal a faulty CPU or firmware. I used to have a 3600x that would sometimes crash on idle at low clocks but would run cinebench or geekbench all day and all night.
For sure. It would catch a subset of issues.
I would think so, but it sounds similar enough with the symptoms and very similar on the model CPU so I thought I’d mention it