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Computer briefly black-screens and closes everything

I’m on arch, using KDE. AMD CPU and GPU.

For the last few months, my computer will occasionally go into a TTY briefly and show a few things (way too fast to read) and then shoot me back to the desktop where every program that was running is closed. Almost like a mini crash.

Super weird. I tried looking in /var/log, but couldn’t find anything relevant.

Anyone know what’s up with this?

chon ,

Are you on wayland by any chance? I had that same problem and it went away when I changed back to xorg (Debian 12 - KDE - AMD APU)

chon ,

I’d be happy to receive feedback on the downvote.

MyUnclesSecret ,

Not sure why you got downvoted. Maybe it was the missing period. You know how flaky people can be. Thanks for your comments though and hope life is treating you well otherwise.

Ocelot ,

that makes me think graphics driver maybe? Check dmesg output right after it happens, you might see something getting reset.

KindredAffiliate OP ,

Yes I think I found it, kwin_wayland is segfault’ing randomly, causing the whole session to crash and restart.

Not sure how to fix that though …

Kerfuffle ,

Are you using a distro with fairly recent packages? If not, then possibly you could try looking for supplementary sources that could provide more recent version. Just as an example, someone else mentioned having a similar issue on Debian. Debian tends to be very conservative about updating their packages and they may be quite outdated. (It’s possible to be on the other side of the problem, with fast moving distros like Arch but they also tend to fix stuff pretty fast as well.)

Possibly worth considering that hardware can also cause random crashes, faulty RAM, overheating GPUs, CPUs, memory or overclocking stuff beyond its limits. Try checking sensors to make sure temperatures are in a reasonable range, etc.

You can also try to determine if the times it crashes have anything in common or anything unusual is happening. I.E. playing graphics intensive games, hardware video decoding, that kind of thing. Some distros have out of memory process killers set up that have been known to be too aggressive, and processes like the WM that can control a lot of memory will sometimes be a juicy target for them.

As you probably already know if you’ve been using Linux for a while, diagnosing problems is usually a process of elimination. So you need to eliminate as many other possibilities as you can. Also, it’s general hard for people to help you with such limited information. We don’t know the specific CPU, GPU, distribution, versions of software, what you were doing when it occurred, anything like that. So we can’t eliminate many possibilities to give you more specific help. More information is almost always better when asking for technical help on the internet.

Zamundaaa ,

Please start a gdb console for the last crash with coredumpctl debug kwin_wayland, get a backtrace in there with “bt full” and create a bug report with the backtrace at bugs.kde.org

BitSound ,

coredumpctl might help, it keeps track of whenever a process just ups and dies hard.

KindredAffiliate OP ,

It looks like kwin_wayland is on there as “inaccessible” about the time it last happened

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