Freezes, EFI Update, and Firmware Updates

Help Desk Hardware Help
1

I’ve been having issues lately in my Fedora 37 Plasma desktop. It occasionally freezes and appears to do so randomly. I’ve noticed that it appears to freeze less after I’ve stopped using a Firefox based browser, Chromium, and after stopping downloading the full Monero blockchain.

Hardware
Asus Corsair Hero VI motherboard (no wifi)
AMD Ryzen 2700X cpu
Radeon RX 570 gpu
Corsair Vengence LPX DDR4 memory
Samsung SSD, ScanDisk SSD, and several WD and Seagate spinning drives for storage.

I ran memtest86 over the night and there were zero errors which isn’t surprising since the memory is pretty new. The efi is version 3502. The most recent version is 8601. It’s never been updated. I attempted to update the efi firmware via the internet while in the efi and the download froze. Fortunately it froze during the download and not during the update. I do know how to update the efi firmware after watching numerous YouTube videos. It’s a fairly straight forward process since the desktop dual boots Windows 10. After updating the efi firmware, I intend to update the other device firmware through the firmware update manager in the Fedora terminal.

What I’d like to know is whether there are hardware diagnostic tools to check the cpu, motherboard, chipset, harddrives, and gpu.

Additionally and I don’t know if it’s related, but I will randomly have odd write permission errors when attempting to use some apps. Usually rebooting fixes the problem.

Thanks in advance.

2

I’d keep a close eye on you’re free memory and CPU/GPU temps. You may software with a memory leak or a cooling problem.

If you just want a quick terminal command for watching memory:

watch free -h

If you want a script that’ll log in the background every minute:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
LogFile=$HOME'/mem_log.txt'
while true; do
	while read Type Total Used Free Shared Buff_cache Available; do
		if [[ $Type == 'Mem:' ]]; then
			printf '%(%H:%M:%S)T - ' >> "$LogFile"
			printf '%s%s%s\n' "$Free" ' of ' "$Total" >> "$LogFile"
		fi
	done <<< $(free -h)
	sleep 60
done

For temps you can use the lm-sensors package:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/lm_sensors

watch -n 1 sensors

Not sure for GPU

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3

I use bpytop to keep an eye on cpu temp, cpu usage, and memory use and haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary levels. Also Fedora has a warning notification if cpu temp becomes critical.

4

You could check the SMART information for your storage.

sudo dnf install smartmontools
lsblk
sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdX
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5

Make sure your Bios is up to date. and or maybe use trim
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/EnableFSTrimTimer

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6

Thanks, I just used Gnome Disks to check the health of the drives and they all read okay.

7

Worth checking your logs, this’ll give you all the errors and auto-scroll to the bottom (latest).

journalctl --pager-end --catalog --priority=3
# Or: journalctl -exp 3

Remove --catalog if you don’t want the explanations.

You could also try booting to a live distro from a different upstream like ubuntu, use it for a while and see if the problem persists.

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8

FStrimtimer is already enabled.

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9

Just remember if you update your Bios it could wipe out your boot entries.
Not sure about Fedora but this would happen on Arch and I would have to re-do Grub and my EFI in order to see it again in the Bios

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10

Thanks, I’m already familiar with that likelihood.

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11

Sometimes a fresh load will fix it as well (after updating the bios)

12

Have a look at the dmesg command to see if there are significant errors being reported there:

dmesg | grep -i warning
dmesg | grep -i fail

Then look at the various logs in:

/var/log
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13

Yep, looks like a bug in the bios/efi according to Red Hat Bugzilla. This is what came up.

[ 0.000000] ACPI BIOS Warning (bug): Optional FADT field Pm2ControlBlock has valid Length but zero Address: 0x0000000000000000/0x1 (20220331/tbfadt-615)

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14

I’ve updated bios/efi. Hopefully that will cure the freezing problem.

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15

Had a very similar issue on a B450 with a Ryzen 5 1600 af.
Worked for me! good luck/

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16

Just an update. It has been thirty days since the UEFI was updated in my desktop and there has been a grand total of one instance when the PC froze on me. Which is much better than the four or five times a week that it previously was.

Big thank you to everyone who responded with suggestions.

2 Likes
17

Glad to hear!

1 Like