As of about a week or 2 ago my librem 5 has started freezing what seems like at random.
Sometimes it will freeze the moment I plug it in to charge, or unplug it from a charger, or when I attempt to wake it, or try to input my password on the lock screen, or close an application, in all cases I have to hard reset it, and then sometimes it’s frozen at pre-boot before it asks for the encryption password, the only sign of life is the power led that is stuck on green, in which case it might take 5+ hard resets before it stops freezing and boots.
I’ll try to connect to it over serial to see if I can view what’s happening but given it’s totally unresponsive to everything else I doubt that will get me far.
Does the journalctl log show something for the times when this has happened?
If you note the time when it happened, then later when you have the phone working again you can run something like sudo journalctl --since today to show log entries from that day. There could be some interesting error messages there.
Many moons ago, I found out that the Lenovo charger I had didn’t play well with the Librem 5. The phone would get quite hot and it would flood the journal with charging negotiation messages multiple times per second.
I am quite lazy to find the thread now but… have you tried another charger?
(this is for the charger use case)
The second thing I’d check is just do a fsck on your file system and confirm everything is fine.
The third thing I’d check, if you have the chance to connect via tty, is to just have journalctl rolling and maybe top and use the phone as normally as humanly possible when tethered and see if you catch the moment it freezes (make your terminal emulator long enough). Maybe you will be able to pin down to a specific moment.
For it freezing before you enter the decryption password, I am not sure… maybe a file system corruption?
Unfortunately i’m thinking there’s a hardware failure somewhere with it freezing immediately after powering on (not wake from suspend), I still use the stock charger and only occasionally charge off my desktop. It’s been freezing so much that I’ve just been leaving the battery out, sometimes it takes 10+ attempts to get it past pre-boot and I just haven’t had time for debugging.
I did check the logs and nothing showed that indicated some kind of segfault, and even with a hard crash I’d expect a log to get cut off somewhere but nope. I wanted to backup my home directory before upgrading to crimson so it’s not anything post-upgrade.
[edit] Just as I submitted this post, I was connected over serial to the phone and with top running it froze. Totally unresponsive over serial connection, so it’s not just the display that’s unresponsive. The phone had only been on for 46 minutes and plugged in for about ~30 minutes.
One of my Librem 5’s freeze because the screen glue came off. At certain angles the screen just flops out off, and its been doing this while it is on and in-use. When it happens the input freezes – but actually it comes back if I lock and unlock with the power button.
I had the same issue with the screen popping out, but since mine was also broken I just replaced it rather than regluing.
In regards to my issue, I started removing parts to see if the phone would function normally after removing hardware, had sim tray, modem and wifi module removed and experienced no freezing for the entire day. A lot of crumbled plastic did fall out during disassembly where it was crushed under the screws around the border, so I wonder if a piece of plastic ended up lodged somewhere and was causing a short. I have it reassembled and so far it hasn’t frozen.
Problem now is the plastic being so degraded there’s nothing left for the screws to fasten it together.
Most likely was a loose piece of plastic messing with the board, since reassembly there has not been any issue with freezing. Considering the issue resolved.
