I recently bought an HP 14-em0002la to replace an HP laptop (Envy) that mysteriously failed on me. The laptop has an AMD Radeon graphics card and AMD Ryzen 5 7000 series processors. I was careful to track down the same graphics hardware that I had on my previous laptop, as this worked without problems until the video card suddenly died.
I wiped the Windows installation and installed Ubuntu 22.04 from a USB drive using the default partitions, as is standard practice. The installation was relatively painless, but I am now experiencing random, but frustratingly frequent, desktop crashes, and I have no idea why. Nothing I could find in any of the log files indicated any sort of failure or crash, but I am not an expert on system administration. I typically use the laptop at home with a second monitor attached vía HDMI. Disconnecting the second monitor does not seem to have had any effect on the likelihood of desktop crashes. The crashes are not only random, but of varying intensity. Sometimes the desktop will only hang for a minute or so, and then return to normal operation. Sometimes the desktop will hang, Dropbox will crash, and then the desktop will return to operation. Other times, the display will freeze and the system will stop accepting all mouse and keyboard input, requiring a hard reset. As I said, none of these incidents seem to be recorded in the system log or any other error logs that I know of. I have also noticed other unusual issues, such as Firefox displaying bizarre artifacts or colors when used in the secondary display. In terms of triggers, I have not detected any pattern yet. It is possible that Firefox has been running on all occasions, as I use that to access my email, calendar, task list, etc., and so have it running frequently.
I have investigated the issue, but have not found much helpful information. I have installed the AMD GPU drivers for Ubuntu 22.04, which I downloaded from the AMD site (https://www.amd.com/en/support/linux-drivers).
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, as it is difficult to use a machine that keeps randomly crashing on me.
Below is some hardware and system information that might be relevant.
0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ lshw -C video *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: /dev/fb0 version: c1 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix vga_controller bus_master cap_list fb configuration: depth=32 driver=amdgpu latency=0 mode=1366x768 resolution=1920,1080 visual=truecolor xres=1366 yres=768 resources: iomemory:7c0-7bf iomemory:7c0-7bf irq:46 memory:7ce0000000-7cefffffff memory:7cf0000000-7cf01fffff ioport:1000(size=256) memory:c0400000-c047ffff0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ lspci | grep VGA03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 1506 (rev c1)0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ lsb_release -aNo LSB modules are available.Distributor ID: UbuntuDescription: Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTSRelease: 22.04Codename: jammy0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ uname -aLinux hp-lap 6.5.0-27-generic #28~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Mar 15 10:51:06 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/LinuxI have noticed that most crashes occur when I am using Zoom, Firefox, Zotero, Okular, or some combination thereof. These all might be placing fairly high demands on the graphics card, but again I am not seeing anything telling in the system log. Thinking perhaps the issue might be the connection to the second monitor, I tried disconnecting the HDMI cable. This does not seem to have any influence on the probability of the system crashing.
I have plenty of swap space:
total used free shared buff/cache availableMem: 7330572 3893816 490276 96468 2946480 3037316Swap: 2097148 3584 2093564Overheating seems unlikely, as the laptop sits on a shelf designed for the purpose, with plenty of ventilation.
I searched the web again for similar problems. One suggestion was to replace the snap version of Firefox with a DEB installation. This has not helped.
UPDATE (2024-05-01)The frequency has increased from one crash or freeze every few days to five or six crashes/freezes per day. I am not sure what to do, as I need a working computer to, well, work, but I cannot afford to buy yet another one at this point.
If nobody knows what the problem might be, could someone perhaps suggest another distro that is known to be compatible with this hardware?