Problems with Intel Core i7-12700

[Locutus]

When I first bought my new computer (HP Pavilion Desktop TP01-3xxx with the Intel Core i7-12700 CPU) two years ago, I installed then brand-new Kubuntu 22, and I started to have problems with the system crashing (freezing so that only a hard reset would help) from time to time (like once every two days). After a thorough internet mining in my quest of solution, I added the following boot parameter in GRUB configuration - intel_idle.max_cstate=1 - and it helped. The downfall? Since my upgrade to Kubuntu 24 last Sunday, the CPU started to be permanently overclocked (ticking at 4.3 GHz on idle) which made fans run noisily from time to time, which was a bit spooky for someone who had never heard the fans in the past two years. I've just removed removed the intel_idle.max_cstate from GRUB and it's behaving again as it should (800 MHz on idle, rising according to the needs).

Two questions to someone who understands this CPU business much more than me: why such a change of behaviour between Kubuntu 22 and 24? Should I expect the freezes to come back?

[claydoh]

Progress - kernel and related improvements, but much more likely Intel firmware/microcode updates - there was one very recently (the past week or less iirc)

[Locutus]

The problem is that the freezing crash problem is back. Not too often, about once per week, but it's there. Do you think that setting intel_idle.max_cstate to a value like 2 could help?

Here are the last logs before the freeze from journalctl:

nov. 03 17:55:01 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx CRON[16953]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root(uid=0) by root(uid=0)
nov. 03 17:55:01 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx CRON[16954]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)
nov. 03 17:55:01 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx CRON[16953]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root
nov. 03 17:55:47 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx rtkit-daemon[1737]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
nov. 03 17:55:47 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx rtkit-daemon[1737]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
nov. 03 17:56:26 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx rtkit-daemon[1737]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
nov. 03 17:56:26 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx rtkit-daemon[1737]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
nov. 03 18:00:05 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx rtkit-daemon[1737]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
nov. 03 18:00:05 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx rtkit-daemon[1737]: Supervising 8 threads of 5 processes of 1 users.
nov. 03 18:05:01 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx CRON[17258]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root(uid=0) by root(uid=0)
nov. 03 18:05:01 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx CRON[17259]: (root) CMD (command -v debian-sa1 > /dev/null && debian-sa1 1 1)
nov. 03 18:05:01 JW-HP-Pavilion-Desktop-TP01-3xxx CRON[17258]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root

[Locutus]

For anyone that might have a similar problem: setting intel_idle.max_cstate to 2 helped. The crashes are gone and the processor works as it should (800 MHz on idle, going up when necessary). BTW, before correcting that I had another crash that slightly damaged the NTFS partition on the data hard drive (fortunately it was nothing that booting under windows [it was the second time in the past 2.5 years, the first was when I bought the computer to make space on the drive for linux] and running chkdsk D:/ -f wouldn't solve).