I have HP ZBook Firefly laptop with Ubuntu 20.04.2 on it. And about once a week it freezes. I'm going to describe the last freezing that I had recently:
- My laptop didn't respond to mouse (the cursor was stuck) and keyboard
- Ctrl + Alt + FN hotkey didn't work
- Alt + SysRq + REISUB hotkey didn't work
- When the freezing happened, I was working with a Git repository and after I restarted my laptop the repository was broken. Any git command said:
fatal: loose object <hash> (stored in .git/objects/<hash>/<hash>) is corrupt /var/log/syslogdidn't have any useful information. But the/var/log/syslogfile had some non-printable characters in it (some random bytes). I guess when the freezing happened the file got corrupted.
The laptop has no visible physical damage, it doesn't overheat (as far as I can tell). Also, I don't see any consistency in these freezes. It happens without any relation with software that is running at the moment of the freeze (as far as I can tell).
I see two possible explanations:
- Kernel freeze. For example, some driver can cause a kernel freeze. But my physical components (cpu, ram, drive, etc) are pretty common and from popular vendors. Also, I think even user space software can theoretically cause a kernel freeze. But the kernel is very stable, so it's unlikely.
- Physical component issue. For example, RAM is corrupted and causes Ubuntu freezes from time to time.
So, why is my laptop freezing? And how can I fix it?
