System freezes often with 14.0-p6 and minimal KDE Plasma

[resilient294]

Running FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p6 with the plasma5-plasma desktop environment and the system freezes after about 5-7 days. I cannot use any application, close or switch between windows, the only thing that's not frozen is the mouse cursor. Waiting doesn't solve the problem.

The machine is a Thinkpad with 16GB or RAM and today it had two browsers open, Dolphin and Kate. I've never encountered this on FreeBSD 13 with XFCE, so I'm not sure how to handle the situation.

What is best for the system to do in this kind of a situation? I had to use the laptop's power button, but I'm wondering if there's a better option.

 

[zirias@]

The better option is to analyze it ...

When your mouse cursor still moves, the OS itself doesn't (completely) "hang". Although unlikely, check /var/log/messages for suspicious (kernel) log messages.

Try to analyze what's going on while your "desktop" session appears frozen. Sometimes, virtual consoles are still accessible, try that (crtl+alt+f2 for example). If that doesn't work, try to access your machine over the network (ssh). As a last resort if even that fails, you might look into giving it a serial (RS-232) console.

Then you can check things on the commandline, probably starting with top(1) to see process status and whether some processes consume excessive amounts of CPU or RAM ...

 

[resilient294]

When your mouse cursor still moves, the OS itself doesn't (completely) "hang". Although unlikely, check /var/log/messages for suspicious (kernel) log messages.

Thanks. These are the /var/log/messages of the day until the system froze and reboot. Anything I should be worried about?

Apr 25 09:14:28 potter dhclient[49239]: unknown dhcp option value 0x7d
Apr 25 09:30:58 potter kscreenlocker_greet[71956]: in _pam_exec(): pam_sm_setcred: pam_get_authtok(): authentication token not available
Apr 25 11:15:15 potter kernel: ugen1.6: <Google Pixel 4a (5G)> at usbus1
Apr 25 12:35:52 potter kscreenlocker_greet[92970]: in _pam_exec(): pam_sm_setcred: pam_get_authtok(): authentication token not available
Apr 25 13:44:16 potter kernel: ugen1.6: <Google Pixel 4a (5G)> at usbus1 (disconnected)
Apr 25 14:00:14 potter kscreenlocker_greet[43635]: in _pam_exec(): pam_sm_setcred: pam_get_authtok(): authentication token not available
Apr 25 15:35:15 potter kscreenlocker_greet[64723]: in _pam_exec(): pam_sm_setcred: pam_get_authtok(): authentication token not available
Apr 25 15:54:03 potter kscreenlocker_greet[3306]: in _pam_exec(): pam_sm_setcred: pam_get_authtok(): authentication token not available
Apr 25 17:18:12 potter kscreenlocker_greet[94340]: in _pam_exec(): pam_sm_setcred: pam_get_authtok(): authentication token not available
Apr 25 17:41:36 potter ntpd[16267]: ntpd exiting on signal 15 (Terminated)
Apr 25 17:41:36 potter kernel: .
Apr 25 17:41:37 potter kernel: pid 47497 (pulseaudio), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 6 (no core dump - other error)
Apr 25 17:41:37 potter syslogd: exiting on signal 15
Apr 25 18:36:14 potter syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
Apr 25 19:18:03 potter kernel: ---<<BOOT>>---

Then you can check things on the commandline, probably starting with top(1) to see process status and whether some processes consume excessive amounts of CPU or RAM ...

I think that Firefox could be the issue. One day after boot, three tabs open and 1.3GiB of memory used. Seems a bit high when compared to Falkon, 16 tabs open and 600 MiB used.