Brave and/or LibreWolf freezing in minutes when open

General Help
1

I've been using Zorin OS 18 for about 4 days. My system is a Gigabyte Z97X-UD5H MB, an i7-4790K CPU (4 GHz), 4 cores. AMI BIOS Ver. F6, 5/7/2014. BIOS Mode UEFI, 32 GB 1866 Ram. Dual Boot with Windows 10 V 10.0.19045 (latest since the EOS). I have a Logitech K750 Solar KB to a Logitech Unifying Receiver, and a Kensington Expert Mouse Wireless Trackball to a Nano Wireless Receiver.
I've an EVO 870 1T Disk 0 with EFI, Windows utilizing the whole rest of the drive with a recovery partition at the end (last 550 mb). Zorin is on its own EVO 870 1T. The 3rd disk is an EVO 870 1T that is currently unallocated, and the 4th disk is an EVO 870 1T for Windows data and files. I'm using the built in graphics in the i4790, I believe they are Intel 4600.

Windows runs great. I do a lot of engineering type work using Spice, KiCAD, embedded programming, etc. Windows has and still does run without error. I wanted to go to ZORIN as a way to get into Linux the easy way.

I did my install according to the guide: downloaded Pro, downloaded balenaEtcher and installed, then made the install disk on a new ADATA UV260 / 64GB USB drive. I made sure Secure Boot was turned off and Fast Boot also. The install went well, except I installed a 2nd EFI partition onto my Zorin drive, which I later read could cause issues. So, I deleted both partitions and installed Zorin from the same Flash Drive. I just left off the EFI partition. It all worked great. Then I started to configure Zorin, all worked well and then I started Brave, which went for about 3 minutes, then froze. The mouse froze and the keyboard stopped responding, I had picture, but nothing worked. I shut down and rebooted and repeated the same scenario and had the same outcome. Then I tried going through the Forums and it would freeze anywhere from 3 minutes to 15 minutes. So, I went through the forums on Windows and found some interesting threads. One of them talked about integrated graphics causing problems due to shared memory, so I went into my bios and changed the video memory allocation to 512 MB and DMT. No joy. I then saw some info that Wayland can cause issues, so I switched to Xorg and no joy. I also shut off graphics acceleration...no joy.

I then downloaded and used Rufus to install Zorin on the Flash Drive, deleted the Volume Zorin was on and reinstalled Zorin back on the same drive. I booted and opened Brave (after switching to Xorg) and it froze in about 2 minutes.
I then unpinned Brave and started LibreWolf with DuckDuckGo and no joy. If I don't open a browser the desktop seems pretty stable. I successfully downloaded and installed KiCAD 9.0.6 through the apt interface and did a lot of configuring and even started a new project, all about 2 hours worth of work. Then I opened LibreWolf and did some surfing and it froze in about 5 minutes.

Then I went into my BIOS and disabled (I think) XHDI? It's supposed to handle handing off control of the USB layer in the BIOS to the OS after it starts to initialize. I noticed sometimes that I had to remove my Nano receiver from its port sometimes when I boot or restart. It seems to hang the BIOS sometimes when installed.

I've thought about using a wired mouse but I really want to use my trackball, also the trackball works fine until I open a browser...

Any ideas or suggestions at this point would be greatly appreciated.

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If you installed Zorin OS pro version you are supposed to get technical support (at least that what I heard with the older versions). Check the main web site to see if that's still the case.

Also try the wired mouse. I expect the problem will still be there but If you get the same problem then you can cross the trackball off the list of potential issues.

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Just for clarity, is the browser freezing or the entire system? It sounds like the former, but obviously there's a big difference between the two, so best to be sure. You might try running the browser from the command line. (I expect the command to be brave or librewolf respectively, but don't use them and am not sure.) This won't fix your issue, but there's a chance console output could help point to a cause.

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When they sent me the link to download Pro they also sent a code to use for the tech support. I'm trying to eliminate as much as possible and also try as many fixes as possible.

Tried wired mouse...no joy.

5

Good question. I went to Youtube music and played some music and when it froze up the music kept playing, BUT it was only the last 1 second or so over and over in a never-ending loop. I couldn't do anything to recover except shut down with the power button or reset button. Off to try running from command line. I'm a newb on Linux so I'm assuming it's from the Terminal?

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If you had to use power or reset, it's locking up your entire computer. When you have these freezes, is it always while playing media, or does it happen on any browser use at all?

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When it locks it must be putting the processor in a tight loop, because the graphics are still working, but the processor can't continue.

When it freezes it seems to be in a browser. So far, I've only tried Brave and libreWolf. They seem to behave the same, i.e. random freezing.

Also, I forgot to put this into the OP, Last night I ran Memtest (most recent version) and it showed no errors.

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So I didn't say this previously because how such things work in Linux are beyond me (honestly they're beyond me in Windows and MS-DOS, too), but the hard lock repeating one second of sound reminded me of IRQ and DMA conflicts in the old MS-DOS 5.0 days--two pieces of hardware trying to access the same resource at the same time and tripping everything up. If that's the case, I honestly don't know how to go about proving it in Linux, much less solving it.

I assume no output from the command line?

1 Like
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If you are using dual boot, please disable fast startup in Windows at energy settings.
You should also disable secure boot and fast boot in the BIOS (or create a MOK key).
Otherwise, you have already tried the most important things, such as switching to XOrg and disabling hardware acceleration.

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I remember that too. In Windows you can go to System Information and there is a section that lists conflicts. I wonder if there is anything like that on Zorin?

Nothing it just sat there frozen. I also had Monitor up, but nothing was revealed. I don't think anything could be revealed since the whole thing locks up.

There is one other notable piece of info I just thought of, based on your statement about MS-DOS 5.0, and IRQ's/DMA. When I did the install I dropped the little arrow and it showed a small window to show the output and progress during it. There was one line that said something about PulseAudio and the root user and that it said something about it's using root as 1000 not 0 or the other way around. Occasionally, when I'm booting into Zorin, right before it goes to the login screen, I'll see up top on the left Disabling IRQ 16. In Windows IRQ 16 is the audio interrupt. However audio does work although it dies after a while.

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Thanks Forpli, I have disabled secure boot and fast boot in the BIOS. I'm off to check and disable if needed fast startup in Windows.

1 Like
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I just checked and it was not enabled.

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I just realized that when I switched browsers I didn't turn off hardware acceleration in libreWolf. I just did that. Hopefully it will correct the situation.

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Well, it seemed to last about 25 minutes instead of 5, so that's an improvement, but it's not fixed...yet.

15

I know how to get at that information, but there's no friendly "here's a conflict" to the best of my knowledge. Back to the console:

sudo apt install procinfo
lsdev

That has nicer formatting. To get a real mess:

cat /proc/interrupts

I imagine that if this is actually the cause, you'd have two devices listed in lsdev's output using the same IRQ, but again this isn't something I've ever troubleshot on Linux. You may need to run these commands while the browser is running. I hope this finds you something, but my confidence is low since I'm relying on a notion about problems I remember from 30 years ago, on modern hardware and a different OS.

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You could try it with disabling Hardware Acceleration in the Browser Settings. Or start it over the Terminal:

brave-browser --disable-gpu

librewolf --disable-gpu

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I just ran those 2 command lines and there were no conflicts... i.e. separate numbers for each IRQ and only 2 DMA channels and they were different. I had to go to bed before I responded here, but I left Zorin up with no browser open. When I came back here this morning the desktop was still up and running. That's good news. It must be something with the browser...some resource or wonky function in Mozilla itself? Could it be a memory leak?

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I have those disabled through the settings i/f. Are you suggesting that I try running them that way anyway?

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That would be one incredible memory leak. They don't typically go from fine to hang instantly--you'd see degraded performance first as swapping increases, and you'd get more than a few minutes of use before failure. You can watch memory use with System Monitor if you'd like to make sure though.

20

A couple more things... I noticed in the browser that IPV6 was enabled, so I disabled that. Then I noticed that in the Network tab in settings which I had set up everything looked correct (I use static addresses and use my Domain Server as the DNS server), but then I saw in Utilities at the top was Advanced Network Configuration. I opened that and found that many of the settings were not in alliance with the settings in my Network tab. I'm a newb here and the install is kind of new to me. I'm trying to find a screen Snip tool to show some shots of the tabs. But I have to do it with the browser open and it seems to have a time limit before the browser freezes...please bear with me.