Hi everyone,
I have been experiencing some weird problems lately, starting with the OS becoming unresponsive “randomly”. After reinstalling multiple times (different filesystems, tried XFS and BTRFS, different nvme slots with different nvme drives, same results) I have narrowed it down to heavy IO operations on the nvme drive. Most of the time, I can’t even pull up dmesg, and force shutdown, as ZSH gives an Input/Output error no matter the command. A couple of times I was lucky enough for the system to stay somewhat responsive, so that I could pull up dmesg.
It gives a controller is down, resetting message, which I’ve seen on archwiki for some older Kingston and Samsung nvmes, and gives Kernel parameters to try (didn’t help much, they pretty much disable aspm on pcie).
What did help a bit was reverting a recent bios upgrade on my MSI Z490 Tomahawk, causing the system to not crash immediately with heavy I/O, but rather mount as ro, but the issue still persists. I have additionally run memtest86 for 8 passes, no issues there.
I have tried running the lts Kernel, but this didn’t help. The strange thing is, this error does not happen on Windows 11.
Has anyone experienced this before, and can give some pointers on what to try next? I’m at my wits end here. EDIT: When this issue first appeared, I assumed the Kioxia drive was defective, which the manufacturer replaced after. This issue still happens with the new replacement drive too, as well as the Samsung drive. I thus assume, that neither drives are defective (smartctl also seems to think so)
Here are hardware and software details:
- Arch with latest Zen Kernel, 6.7.4, happened with other, older kernels too though, tried regular, lts and zen
- BTRFS on LUKS
- i9-10850k
- MSI z490 Tomahawk
- GSkill 3200 MHz RAM, 32GB, DDR4
- Samsung 970 Evo 1TB & Kioxia Exceria G2 1TB (tested both drives, in both slots each, over multiple installs)
- Vega 56 GPU
- Be quiet Straight Power 11 750W PSU
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ssds getting not enough power? i’d test it with different PSU, i had a problem with my ssd failing and changing PSU worked, apparently 3.3VDC rail is routed on the motherboards without any conversion straight to m.2/pcie devices
Unfortunately I don’t have a spare PSU, but I might try to measure the 3.3 volt rail with a multimeter (don’t own an oscilloscope unfortunately) while under load and see what happens
Do you have a spare set up where you can boot up from that same SSD? Literally any laptop would work plug and play and that would rule out the possibility of it being the motherboard on the OP.
Yeah, an oscilloscope would be handy in hunting spikes, it’s a bit harder with a standard multimeter, you sure you don’t know anyone with a spare PSU to borrow?
you could also try one of those USB to m.2 and see if that works
The only thing I can think of is to try the drives in a different system and see how they behave (same OS and configuration).
If they behave the same then that rules out everything except the drives themselves and the OS.
Considering how you mentioned the behavior is better in Windows, it sounds like a software issue, but you never know until you try.
The other way to look at it is to stick the drives into a usb enclosure. That gets you away from the PC’s 3v3 rail. If you then hang the drive enclosure off of a powered hub/dock, you are definitely way outside of the PC’s power supply problems.
Here’s one that I have, hopefully it’s still made halfway good. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08G14NBCS/
Not a bad idea actually, totally didn’t think about that.
Unfortunately I have no other system at hand at the moment that’s able to accept nvme drives :( I could try using windows for a couple of days see whether the issue is really linux-related, but I am trying to avoid that lol
Maybe even a PCIe pass through to a VM could do the trick if you’re desparate lol (with Linux living in a separate drive)
Orrrr maybe even try FreeBSD… (or mac OS, but eww gross don’t test that)
Maybe phone a friend?
This is probably a strange question, but did you memtest86 your memory already?
I did, yes. One of the first ideas I got.
I see it now, dammit sorry
Did you even read the post?
I’m sorry, did I overlook the memory tested part? I don’t see it?
Edit: I see it now, sorry
Have you tried a different motherboard?
What brand is Kioxia?
it’s a sub brand of Toshiba, so not some unknown shit, very respected brand i’d say
Yeah I did a bit of reading. I was about to blame the no-name Chinese storage! There’s so much garbage nvme stuff floating around lately.
there is so much garbage flash in general lately
yeah the entire market segment is riddled with cheap chinese shit to downright fraudulent devices.
If you have swap enabled, disabling it may prevent your Linux from freezing. You can try it out with
swapoff -a.Thanks, will try. Although I don’t think this’ll be an issue, as I have more than enough memory, swap should only be used for hibernation
Have you tried booting from a live image? I’d try downloading something with a live option like Ubuntu to a flash drive, and then trying to mount the drive from that. Anecdotally I had massive issues with Manjaro a while back where it would “lose” access to entire usb bays on the motherboard that didn’t happen in Debian etc.
From what you have commented I would lean toward either a power issue or a pcie signaling issue. Are you running any kind of overclock? You could try underclocking and see if that stabilizes it as it won’t draw as much power.
