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Ubuntu 22.04, started freezing 2 days ago when playing videos in browser. No heating or signs of increased mem usage before this happens. Sometimes vids play for a minute or so, sometimes immediate freeze. Screen becomes unresponsive, and I have to manually shutdown. Applies to any video (youtube, dailymotion, twitter...). Updated Chrome to latest, turned off all extensions, ran sudo update and upgrade, verified no pending software updates. Videos in VLC work fine, BTW. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

O H
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3 Answers3

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I suspect this has to do with kernel version 6.8, which is the default for users using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Hardware Enablement Stack (HWE) stack. The General Availability (GA) stack comes with kernel version 5.15. [1]

I switched back to kernel v6.5 three days ago, and I haven't experienced these freezes since - I used to get them multiple times a day, to a point where I avoided any videos and websites with videos.

To check which kernel version you run, call:

$ uname -r
6.5.0-45-generic

As you see, I now run kernel v6.5. I used to see:

$ uname -r
6.8.0-45-generic

To check whether you have the GA or HWE stack, call:

$ apt list --installed | grep linux-generic
linux-generic-hwe-22.04/jammy-updates,jammy-security,now 6.8.0-45.45~22.04.1 amd64 [installed]

As you see, I run the HWE stack. If you see the -hwe- part, you use HWE, otherwise you use the GA stack.

We all have multiple kernel versions installed. You can check which ones you have installed, their creation dates, and when you installed them, by calling:

$ $ stat --format="%n [v=%y i=%z]" /boot/vmlinuz-* | sed -E 's/ [[:digit:]]+:[^ ]+ [-+][[:digit:]]+//g'
/boot/vmlinuz-5.19.0-50-generic [v=2023-07-10 i=2023-07-29]
/boot/vmlinuz-6.2.0-39-generic [v=2023-11-16 i=2023-12-15]
/boot/vmlinuz-6.5.0-45-generic [v=2024-07-15 i=2024-07-29]
/boot/vmlinuz-6.8.0-45-generic [v=2024-09-11 i=2024-09-20]

As you see, I have 5.19, 6.2, 6.5, and 6.8 on my system. I think all these versions were installed from the HWE stack. If I had stayed with the GA stack, I expect that the most recent version would have been 5.15.

You can switch to a previous kernel version when you boot up the computer. This is done in the GRUB menu that you can access when the compute launches. If it does not show automatically, I think you can enter it by holding down Shift during boot [2]. I have mine configured to always show. To switch to an older Linux kernel, select GRUB menu entry 'Advanced options for Ubuntu', and from there you should be able to select one of the above kernel versions.

FWIW, I'm running Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS (HWE) on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Generation 9 (20XW00QLUS), with 32 GiB RAM and 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1185G7 @ 3.00GHz CPUs.

Updates

  • 2024-11-05: The problem remains with kernel 6.8.0-48.

References

HenrikB
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I had the same issue after running usual updates on my 22.04 LTS. After digging a little bit I noticed that switching from Wayland to Xorg seems to fix the issue. No clue why, let's hope a soon-to-be-released update will fix this more permanently.

leo monsaingeon
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0

Edit: I'm Currently on kernel version 6.11 zabbly and the issue came back. It might actually have come back in 6.10 already. I solved it by downgrading to the official 5.15 kernel as suggested by HenrikB. 5.15 was no longer installed so I installed it with:

sudo apt install linux-image-generic

I then configured Grub to remember the last manual selection. Finally, I selected 5.15 at boot. I think that every time there is a kernel update, the order is reset, so I need to manually select 5.15 again.

I'm quite surprised that this bug is lasting so long, I think the X1C is quite popular among Linux users. It would be great if someone could report if the issue exists on Ubuntu 24.04 too.

I had the same issue on my Lenovo Thinkpad X1C Gen 9, very annoying. I think the issue started after an update, probably around mid-August 2024. I don't know what the source of the issue was, but I upgraded the kernel to 6.10 and since then I haven't experienced any freeze.

To update the kernel I used Zabbly's repos -- see instruction in the readme of the repo. The repo should be trusted (the maintainer has worked at Canonical until recently, see here) and the procedure is straightforward, but I did have to disable Secure Boot, which is not great. As soon as I have a moment I'll just upgrade to 24.04 with the official kernel, which I hope is not affected.

See also a related question here: Frequent semi-hard system freezes 22.04 LTS

korg91
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