Librem 5 system crashes

Hardware Librem 5
1

Hello everyone,

I own a Librem 5 for one month, it is not my first linuxphone because I’ve had previously Pinephones (which one was stolen, the other damaged).

While Librem 5 is correctly usable, it remains a serious problem of complete crashing of the system. At the beginning my Librem 5 was about stable, sometimes it went off on its own, it’s annoying but at least I just had to turn it back on.
Few weeks after occurs the first crash, so I had to force shutdown and then reboot it. And then the more time progresses the more crashes become frequent. Last week it crashed 3 times in 4 days. So I decided to stop using it until the issue is solved.

I’ve had a similar issue on my Pinephones (which were running Mobian) so it seems to be a global linuxphone issue but I’m surprised to not find other topics about this issue on this forum.

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What does “crash” mean? Touchscreen unresponsive? Application unresponsive? Sleep/wake button unresponsive?

When it is in this state, is it responsive on the network? For example, can you ping the phone? (presuming that the phone is normally pingable on the network)

Are you open to reflashing the phone?

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I mean touchscreen stays black, buttons are unresponsive (except force shutdown), I’m thinking it happens when the phone is suspended. Except once the touchscreen was displaying a systemd error message, the other times it just stays black.

I didn’t tried yet because I don’t let ssh permanently active, maybe I should

I would but will this solve the issue ? I’ve had a similar issue on my pinephone some years ago, after a number of crashes and forced shutdown it refused to boot so I reflashed it but the issue occured again and again, so I reflashed it several times. I think that because of all this the eMMC was progressively damaged. I don’t want to live this again

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You can ping the phone even if SSH is disabled. However if you are having problems and you find that you can ping the phone then, yes, leaving the SSH server enabled would help with troubleshooting. Then you could try to ssh in. Then you might for example be able to kill a process or restart a service.

Have you tried disabling suspend in that case? (I have a feeling that if the problem is that the phone won’t wake from suspend at all then it won’t be responsive on the network, for ping or ssh or anything else. But that will need to be verified as part of the troubleshooting.)

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Ok I just started it, disabled suspend and enabled ssh. I’ll keep you informed but disabling suspend can not be a definitive solution to daily drive it

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I’m wondering if the described crashes could be related to: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux/-/merge_requests/769.

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Could you try to disable wifi by hardware kill-switch and keep autosuspend on? It fix the issue with back screen for me. Other issues still appear sometime after resume, but I can unlock the phone at least.

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That’s interesting, I’m not enough techie to really understand but the merge request is closed so maybe the code is in the OS now ?

I usually let the Wifi hardware kill-switch in off position when not actively using wifi

[edit] Oh I just see the Martin Kepplinger answer:

So it may be that and I should expect an update soon, I hope it !
I actually have kernel 6.6.0-1-librem5

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Probably, let us know if you want up-to-date instructions for reflashing the Librem 5.

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So, could you confirm that your crashes happened when the wifi kill switch is off?

By the way, the best option to know the exact version of the L5 kernel is to execute command:

# apt list --installed | grep linux-image
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Or you can simply use this command to print the kernel release:

uname -r
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Which has the added advantage of showing the running kernel instead of a list of all installed kernels. So, it looks to be better than “best”.

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Right, the command is also comparatively short and does not require elevated permissions to execute.

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Hello everyone,
So my Librem 5 didn’t crash on this first day of testing with suspend disabled so it seems for now to be a resume from suspend issue.

Yes I can confirm that the crashes happened swith wifi kill-switch off.

Command returns 6.6.0-1-librem5

Thank you, but for now there is an interesting lead to understant the issue, reflashing may be avoided

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It is true, but you will get ''6.6.0-1-librem5" that is not correspond exactly to the kernel version that you have.

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Capture d’écran du 2024-07-06 09-41-34
Capture d’écran du 2024-07-06 09-41-34720×1440 94.3 KB

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Ok, 6.6.32, it must be the most recent. Will waiting for the next one :).

By the way, do you have some stuff on sdcard?

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Yes I set up a swap partition on SD card, and a storage partition where I store big files (downloaded videos)

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Second day without crash, it seems promising

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But the phone becomes unusable for me without suspend as you have to keep it connected to a powerbank all day.

I’ve found at least four issues connected to he suspend/resume bug:

  1. mobile data stop working - may be fixed by preventing modem goes to sleep as it has been done in pmos.
  2. sdcard stop working like in this thread - may be fixed by patching the kernel.
  3. wifi does not go to sleep properly - may be fixed by using kill switches before suspend.
  4. something strange happens during resume - sudo stop working, network connection lost and so on… I have no idea how to debug and about possible workaround :(.

Also I believe that it is much better to keep swap file on the root (mmc) partition as soon as it about ten times faster and free from issue 2.

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