New to Linux Gaming, Nobara

[KGIII]

Is there something I can check out next time I boot the PC up again?

Do 'magic keys' work when you're in this position:

The keyboard light was still on, and the ctrl alt f4 did nothing at all.

Specifically, can you use REISUB when you're in this state?

Hmm... You might not know what I'm talking about. Here's a link:

What You Need To Know About Linux's Magic SysRq Key • Linux Tips

The magic SysRq key can help you deal with a frozen and unresponsive system. It avoids doing a hard reboot and the potential loss of data.

linux-tips.us

 

[Niteme]

Okay, I was going to try Ubuntu, but also I also read that with my GPU the people who rolled back from the 6.14 kernel to the 6.12 kernel showed no more system hangups or freezes.

 

[Niteme]

Do 'magic keys' work when you're in this position:



Specifically, can you use REISUB when you're in this state?

Hmm... You might not know what I'm talking about. Here's a link:

What You Need To Know About Linux's Magic SysRq Key • Linux Tips

The magic SysRq key can help you deal with a frozen and unresponsive system. It avoids doing a hard reboot and the potential loss of data.

linux-tips.us

I will surely check this out next time she hangs up and freezes. I never used this key, lol.

 

[KGIII]

I never used this key, lol.

Yeah, it's a bit obscure. Most Linux users, from what I have seen, never even mention this.

I asked because it's a sign that the computer is truly frozen when in that state. That will give us more information.

Another thing folks can try is the 'Caps Lock' key. Pressing the key sends a small signal to the computer, which then turns on the indicator light. If that key is working, the computer is technically not locked. This is also true for the num lock and scroll lock indicators. None of those will indicate (turning on a light, normally) if the computer is frozen.

I suggested the REISUB method because it'll give you the same information and provide for a clean reboot process, which is something you'll want to do. It's something I think folks might want to learn. There are other key combinations, but that's the one which should reboot the system in a clean state.

 

[Niteme]

Okay, I got Ubuntu 24.04.2 working and I'm going to go through these fixes if hanging and freezing occurs. I did add the GPU Recovery=1 line in the grub though.

 

[f33dm3bits]

I would really love to check out any error logs and get working on that if you're able to help. I had those few errors in the startup.

Okay, she's still freezing and locking up. I mean thankfully, the freeze occurred sooner so I could tell if those changes fixed anything. The keyboard light was still on, and the ctrl alt f4 did nothing at all.

Is there something I can check out next time I boot the PC up again?

Wait! I was getting ubuntu-24.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso as it runs on kernel 6.11 and see how things work out, and

If you are able to get back into your graphical session by the method I mentioned before when your system freezes, you just send your dmesg output to a file and then attach it here.

sudo dmesg > dmesg.txt

Then attach it as a file, if you want to try a different distribution I would try PikaOS.

 

[kibasnowpaw]

Based on the specs you listed and the symptoms (random freezes, especially across different distros like Nobara), this strongly sounds like a kernel and driver stack compatibility issue rather than just “Linux instability” or hardware failure.

With AMD GPUs, especially newer architectures, stability depends on the combination of three main components working together: the Linux kernel (amdgpu driver), Mesa userspace graphics drivers, and firmware packages. If one of these is newer or older than what the GPU generation expects, you can get freezes, GPU hangs, or complete system lockups even if everything appears to install correctly.

Your hardware is very recent (Ryzen 5 9600X and RX 9060 XT), so kernel support maturity matters a lot. Some distributions ship very new kernels or custom patches (like Nobara), and while that can improve performance, it can also introduce regressions depending on the GPU driver state at that moment. Testing Ubuntu 24.04 is a good step because it uses a more standardized kernel/Mesa stack, but it’s still important to verify that the kernel version actually includes stable support for that GPU generation.

If freezes mainly happen under GPU load (gaming, video acceleration, desktop compositing), that is a strong indicator of a driver or kernel mismatch. Checking logs with dmesg | grep -i amdgpu can sometimes show ring timeouts, GPU resets, or VM faults, which point directly at driver issues.

In short, make sure the kernel version you are running is known to properly support that GPU and that Mesa and firmware versions match. Newer hardware often requires either a newer stable kernel or avoiding certain kernel releases that contain regressions.

 

[dos2unix]

6.18 kernel. Later model Radeon, later model Ryzen.
No probleams at all. In fact newer kernels seem to work better for me.

 

[Niteme]

Maybe it's safe to report, but a couple days ago in the afternoon I installed Ubuntu LTS 24.04.2 thinking the kernel would be 6.11 but it's actually 6.17 BUT!... no more freezing. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but I think that solved it. Although I'm worried about updating, so I'll need to figure out the recovery features which I'll do on my own, so when I update if some freezing and locking up occurs I can roll it back.

So I've had the PC for roughly 30 hours without one freezing event. In fact, since I've installed Ubuntu no more freezing. Thanks everyone.

I guess it was best to get a different version of Linux since I wasn't that far into the Linux experience.

 

[MikeWalsh]

I'll totally check out Fedora, but I feel changing Linux OS's is a bit extreme.

Heh. One can tell you're not really "into" the Linux ecosystem in any meaningful way as yet. Some people just "distro-hop" ALL the time. They never, EVER "settle down" with any specific distro.

Most do eventually find the one "the one for them", but some folks just like the thrill of constantly trying something new. It would make more sense to try OSs out from a LiveUSB, but I have heard of some people installing to bare metal, trying-out, uninstalling, re-installing, trying-out....etc, etc, ad infinitum (sometimes 10 times a day.....or more)!

(shrug...)


Mike.

 

[Paul Chase]

Hi, I'm new to Linux, I'm sure this is the first time you folks heard about such things. ;p

So, she keeps freezing and I'm trying to solve this without posting but I am at a loss, and I need to get this new PC to stop randomly locking up and freezing, even when it's doing nothing at all and sitting there, is the issue. Gaming or not, the PC will just randomly freeze and lock up.

I am trying to figure this out within the return window for this new PC. Some basic specs of my PC are:
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X 32GB of memory at 6000mhz Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB and it has a 1TB SSD.

I'm trying to unplug from the windows and google matrix and if there is something basic I can do on windows that is harder on Linux is changing the drivers, which might actually solve my problem. I just, again, am a new user to linux and many of the "fixes" I search out half of them are unable to be used.

I do notice, having a ray tracking GPU for the first time, it mostly works and looks nice, but sometimes I see these tiny white dots within the rays, which might be a driver issue. So there I am. It'll be nice if there was a post I failed to search our properly talking about solutions to forward me to, or feel free to chit-chat here.

Thanks so much everyone.


Additionally: And I've tried a bootable memory stress test with 5 passes and no issues. I would also like to be able to stress test the GPU which I haven't figured out yet. And I'm tried a few other things like adding to the command line in grub GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT='processor.max_cstate=1 quiet split_lock_detect=off' is my current line. I did have this added to it which I removed since it didn't fix the issue, amdgpu.ppfeaturemask=0xffffffff. And I've tried some other things I'm spacing out on, like LACK where I took it from 170watts to 160watts and still freezes. I am hopeful it's just a driver issue which I am just a newbie about with Linux here. Okay, pardon the addition.

If I were you, I would look at the BIOS again and not only Secure Boot, but also the EXPO profile for RAM, because 6000 MHz sometimes causes strange freezes, even if memtest shows nothing, you can reset it to 5600 for the test. It is better to look at logs via journalctl and not search for files manually, because the structure is different. With the GPU, you can run stress via unigine heaven or superposition, it also runs under Linux. And yes, I also once jumped between distributions in search of stability, as with https://dragonlinkpokie.com/ where nothing is clear at first, but over time, reading, you understand how everything works. If even a live USB Ubuntu freezes on the logo, I would seriously think about updating the BIOS or even returning the PC under warranty, because software is software, but this also happens due to hardware.