Ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 24.10 and the 6.11 kernel, my laptop regularly freezes then logs me out. I’d be really grateful for any help and advice to diagnose the problem and then stop it repeating.
I’ve checked the logs with journalctl and get the following:
gnome-shell[168920]: (EE) failed to read Wayland events: Broken pipe
unknown[168151]: Error reading events from display: Broken pipe
systemd[167511]: org.gnome.Shell@wayland.service: Main process exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL
There’s no consistency in the error messages before these. The behaviour can be triggered sometimes (but not always) by connecting an external display, making a window full screen etc. though at other times there’s no pattern. I’ve tried turning off extensions and shutting down most programs but it doesn’t make a difference. The only work around I’ve found is running Ubuntu on X rather than Wayland, making it seem like a Wayland bug.
My laptop has an AMD Ryzen 7 and 16GB RAM, fully updated to latest kernel etc. I’ve found some other reports of this similar sounding error affecting AMD Ryzen laptops although here starting with the 6.7 kernel, which worked fine for me: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3358
That link has one suggestion to set a variable for OpenSUSE but I can’t find the equivalent file for Ubuntu, while another poster asks if a fix will be included in Gnome 48, but that is some months away still and I’m not 100% sure this is the same bug.
Any advice hugely appreciated as the frequent crashes are getting annoying, thanks!
The ~/.config/environment.d directory needs to be created by hand since nothing in Ubuntu uses it by default it will not be pre-created, but it is a systemd --user option so once you create it it will be used for all user processes started by systemd (i.e. gnome-shell)
Thanks very much for responding so quickly, and sorry for slow reply.
I’ve tried that fix, thought it was a solution (though wasn’t using the ext display till today) but have just had another broken pipe crash. So unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have fixed the bug, and I’m now even more unsure what the problem is. The errors in the journal that appear before the “broken pipe” entry are things like tpm and wpa_supplicant that appear all the time, so I don’t know how to diagnose the problem.
Is there anything short of a fresh reinstall that might help?
I’m so glad I found this. I have the exact same problem, with an AMD Ryzen 7 Lenovo Thinkpad T14. I had assumed Thinkpads have good Linux compatibility, and I am so annoyed that this is not the case. I continue to have multiple crashes of Wayland per day, typically when maximising a Window, launching a graphically intense application like a game, screen-sharing a video call; … and typically when I’m using an external display in addition to the laptop’s own.
I am also seeing the same issue on a Ryzen 7 Lenovo t14s Gen 4. Very frustrating when it dies on work calls. I just tried the MUTTER_DEBUG_KMS_THREAD_TYPE=user fix we’ll see if it works over the next day or so