Bug#997663: general: bullseye, system freezes completely when firefox freezes
Package: general
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: jacobkochems+bugtracking@gmail.com
Dear Maintainer,
* What led up to the situation?
When using Firefox (FF) with many open tabs it sometimes freezes and takes the
whole system with it. At this point all mouse and keyboard input is ignored. In
every case so far there was at least one tab with a YouTube video open. I
suspect using a lot of memory is the trigger here.
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)?
I tried to switch to a different tty via Ctrl+Alt+F<N>: no effect.
I tried the magic SysRq key sequence: REISUB: no effect.
I tried SysRq + f to call oom_kill: no effect.
Only a hard reset (power cycle) was effective so far.
* What was the outcome of this action?
The system freezes ignoring all user input.
If a video was playing at that time a short audio sequence of that video keeps
repeating in an infinite loop.
* What outcome did you expect instead?
I expect to be able to kill the offending applications.
I expect the system (be it gnome-shell, the kernel itself or other critical
components) to be able to handle failing user space programs without freezing
themselves. That is why I consider this *not* to be a bug of FF, although a bug
in FF seems to trigger it. No user space program should be able to tank the
system by hogging up resources.
Since I was unable to recover the system from this state I cannot provide any
error messages.
Is there a log file I can inspect after the fact?
If so, what should I look for?
Do I have to activate additional logging for this?
Some system information:
$ uname -v -r -m
5.10.0-9-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.70-1 (2021-09-30) x86_64
CPU: Intel Core i7, 4 Cores
RAM: 8GB
Please let me know if you need additional system information.
I would appreciate any insight into how to diagnose this.
Thank you for your time.
Best regards,
Jacob
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