Strange lockups I can't explain

[megosdog]

Okay, this is a recent issue, and I'm not sure what's causing it. Basically, what happens is, I'll be working along, doing my thing, I'll get a ping via Slack in Brave, the popup will come up, but it never fully loads, and it's just this black box. Shortly after everything else starts locking up, taskbar first, and then everything else. When I go into F2 to see what's overloading things, I don't find hardly any load. I can ctrl-tab for a brief while after the lockup starts, but eventually I can't even F2 or anything. The only way to recover is a full reboot. Again, the only consistency I see is popups and Brave, but nothing else. I did try restarting plasmashell, and it said it couldn't because it couldn't load plugins. Not sure if that's related or not. Any ideas, troubleshooting steps, etc, please let me know. Thanks.

[GreyGeek]

Does dmes give you any hints?

[megosdog]

How would I check that? Is it a log, or a command? Or do you mean dmesg? If you mean that, I didn't see anything in there that stood out. Just the normal bootup information.

[GreyGeek]

Pardon my typo. Dmesg is what I meant.
Kubuntu defaults to xorg.
On the login screeen select wayland and see how it behaves.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I don't know if it is of any use, but you could try sudo dmesg -W >> $HOME/what_is_happening.txt and/or
journalctl -f >> $HOME/what_else_is_happening.txt before you start Brave…

[megosdog]

Hmm, Schwarzer Kater, GreyGeek, I'll give those suggestions a poke later tonight as I'm in the middle of shift, so I can't do any testing at the moment, but I'll definitely let you know what I find when I'm finally able to test. Thanks for the suggestions!

[megosdog]

Mar 04 23:04:25 raiden kernel: audit: type=1326 audit(1677989065.149:1674): auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80340 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:25 raiden audit[80352]: SECCOMP auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80352 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:25 raiden kernel: audit: type=1326 audit(1677989065.205:1675): auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80352 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:32 raiden audit[80371]: SECCOMP auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80371 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:32 raiden kernel: audit: type=1326 audit(1677989072.161:1676): auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80371 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:32 raiden audit[80383]: SECCOMP auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80383 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:32 raiden kernel: audit: type=1326 audit(1677989072.697:1677): auid=1000 uid=1000 gid=1000 ses=3 subj=snap.chromium.chromium pid=80383 comm="chrome" exe="/snap/chromium/2333/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chrome" sig=0 arch=c000003e syscall=330 compat=0 ip=0x7f9f4dddc00b code=0x50000
Mar 04 23:04:34 raiden systemd[1675]: Started Brave Web Browser - Web Browser.
Mar 04 23:05:20 raiden rtkit-daemon[1579]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
Mar 04 23:05:20 raiden rtkit-daemon[1579]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.

I ran that a brief while and got this. And yes, it's brave. I started getting the black notice popups and freakouts in other apps, and then brave started freaking out. Had to do a killall on it, but as soon as I start it, the issue comes back and the freakouts get weirder.

[megosdog]

Welp, whatever it did, it pretty much crashed the entire UI, and it was freaking out Brave, and I tried other things, but ended up having to completely restart. Also, I'm not seeing the option to switch to Wayland when logging in. Do I need to install something to make that available?

[megosdog]

Okay, couldn't salvage Brave the way it was, so blew it away completely and reinstalled. Let's see what happens now. I'll let you know if the issue returns.

[megosdog]

Okay, it's been two days, and everything is stable again (*knock on wood*) so I think Brave had something seriously wrong with it, and whacking and reinstalling was the right solution. But, I'm gonna let it go a while longer just to be sure. Man, that was so crazy weird. lol.

[megosdog]

HA! I just made a new discovery. Slack, in Brave, if it's sending too many notifications the notifications system locks up and crashes the box. So I turned off notifications, and we'll see how it does from there. At least I have a better idea what the issue is now. And thank you guys for coming along on this ride as this has been really interesting, as I've never had desktop notifications crash a box before.

[megosdog]

Okay, progress report, since this is a slow moving, intermittent problem. I let my machine run constantly the last 3 days (normally I shut it down at night when it's not being used) and I've only had Brave up intermittently, for short periods, and I also turned system notifications off for Brave, and a few other apps. There's been zero stability or lockup issues. So, that now narrows things down to either Brave being unstable, or the notifications system has an issue in it, a regression, or something. We'll find out if that's the case once I return to my normal work hours starting tomorrow and Brave has to be up the entire day. So, that being said, it seems I've narrowed this down to two items on the system being the root cause of this, neither one of which I know how to resolve ultimately. One thing I do wonder is if something they're doing is crashing part of plasma (remember the restart and plasma shell plugin issues from before?) that makes it impossible to recover from? So it could even be some odd weirdness in Plasma itself doing this. I'm not sure yet, but that seems to be what I've been able to narrow this down with. I kinda wish there was a way to trigger this crash manually so I could better nail down the issue. But I don't know what the trigger is, and haven't found a way to identify that yet, either. So it's sorta the slow roll towards solving this, unfortunately, as I literally have to wait almost whole days for this to happen.

[GreyGeek]

Wayland is an option on the login screen, in the lower left corner IIRC.

[megosdog]

Yeah, the only thing I have in that corner is the virtual keyboard. ^_^;;

[Thanos]

Okay, progress report, since this is a slow moving, intermittent problem. I let my machine run constantly the last 3 days (normally I shut it down at night when it's not being used) and I've only had Brave up intermittently, for short periods, and I also turned system notifications off for Brave, and a few other apps. There's been zero stability or lockup issues. So, that now narrows things down to either Brave being unstable, or the notifications system has an issue in it, a regression, or something. We'll find out if that's the case once I return to my normal work hours starting tomorrow and Brave has to be up the entire day. So, that being said, it seems I've narrowed this down to two items on the system being the root cause of this, neither one of which I know how to resolve ultimately. One thing I do wonder is if something they're doing is crashing part of plasma (remember the restart and plasma shell plugin issues from before?) that makes it impossible to recover from? So it could even be some odd weirdness in Plasma itself doing this. I'm not sure yet, but that seems to be what I've been able to narrow this down with. I kinda wish there was a way to trigger this crash manually so I could better nail down the issue. But I don't know what the trigger is, and haven't found a way to identify that yet, either. So it's sorta the slow roll towards solving this, unfortunately, as I literally have to wait almost whole days for this to happen.

It should be the notifications, I had the same issue and I don't use brave, but I was crashing with black boxes for notifications. I put my notifications on dunnot disturb mode and it seems stable for now. But it would be great if there was a fix.

[GreyGeek]

Yeah, the only thing I have in that corner is the virtual keyboard. ^_^;;

That's probably because you have not installed plasma-workspace-wayland
After you install it you'll notice what the red arrow is pointing to: