Bugzilla – Bug 1041129
Complete freeze with "ata2: COMRESET failed" when on battery power
Last modified: 2017-09-17 09:33:49 UTC
Created attachment 726715 [details] screenshot of VTY during the crash A few seconds after I unplug the power cord, my laptop starts lagging and freezing more and more until it becomes totally unresponsive. The first symptoms are : applications cannot be launched or closed anymore, gnome-shell starts loosing GUI items, etc. Then the gnome-shell session crashes and in return VTY also become unreachable. On the VTY, the following messages appear : - ata2: COMRESET failed (errno=16) - systemd-journald complaining it cannot write logs. < A photo of the error messages is enclosed here > Same pattern if I try to boot straight on battery power. It fails either early in the boot process or at the login screen. Looking around for the "COMRESET failed" message, I did the following : - update the SSD firmware update to the latest version ; - update the UEFI (Thinkpad T460) Also, note that I freshly install Tumbleweed on Friday. Before, I was on Fedora and never had this issue. So, except a weird coincidence, it is unlikely to be hardware related. Moreover, if my SSD was dying, why it would have no error in SMART and it would fail only on battery power.
Created attachment 726717 [details] Thinkpad UEFI hardware tests Adding here screenshots of Thinkpad hardware tests, including R/W tests and bus checks. All tests are shown as PASSED.
Well, I finally found the culprit, it is not the kernel, it is TLP. I got this hint after finding a similar report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/539467 I had had also bad experiences issues with a similar tool, Powertop. This time, I was not even aware that TLP came installed with Tumbleweed. My opinion is that such tools should NOT be provided by default with any distro. They bring weird instability issues and are not worth it. On modern platforms, most of the powersave takes place at hardware/firmware level and tweaks enabled by these tools don't make much difference. I don't know where to move this report... "installation" maybe ?
It's not CRITICAL if it happened once to one single user. Readjusting severity to a reasonable level.
Not installer related at all.
Sorry for messing with triage and severity (I thought it is a single impact estimate). But I disagree with your assumption that only one user is affected. You cannot tell if other people simply did not report and moved ahead. Several threads for distros like Arch and Ubuntu prove that other users were affected, and it is potentially harming to rely on such tweaking programs (tlp or powertop).
So this bug did affect a lot of people on other distros and still not assigned ? To be on the safe side, openSUSE should NOT install TLP by default. It is not efficient on modern hardware and it is buggy.