I've been trying to install Arch on an old laptop for the past few days but for some reason it will not shut down if I'm using any kernel above version 6.7. It goes all the way through and gets to Reached target: System Power Off but then just sits there and never actually powers down. I waited 30 minutes in case it did something and it never did. I don't believe there is anything useful in the journalctl output as there's nothing after Reached target System Power Off but I'll paste it here in case: https://text.is/4KNL

I tried the shutdown troubleshooting steps from here: https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Debugging/

The debug shell is no help as I can't access it once it hangs, and since it never finishes shutting down the logging script won't help. reboot -f and poweroff -f both work which made me think it wasn't a kernel issue, however it works fine using the linux-lts kernel. Because of this I tried manually downgrading to a few standard kernel versions from 6.6, 6.7 and 6.8 and only the ones above 6.7 had this issue. Specifically the latest lts version (6.6.23 at the time I tested) worked fine, 6.6.9 (the last 6.6 version in the main branch) worked fine, 6.7.arch1-1 and above didn't.

Weirdly I don't have any issues with the installation media (currently using the ones from 29th March and 1st April). I also tried Opensuse Tumbleweed which I believe is on the same kernel version and had no issues so it seems to be Arch specific. I also tried linux-zen in case that had any difference but it didn't help.

I have tried several re-installs with both legacy and UEFI boot, mostly minimal installs (base, linux, linux-firmware, linux-headers and nano). Since the live iso works I also tried installing all the packages from that but it still didn't work.

I'm completely out of ideas at this point. I can't see anything obvious in the kernel 6.7 changelog, but then I don't really know enough to know what to look for there. I know for now I can keep using the lts kernel but presumably at some point that will be upgraded to a version above 6.7 so that doesn't seem like a good long term solution, I'd also really like to know the root cause behind this as its been bugging me for days! The laptop is an Acer aspire E15 with an Intel 6500U (I have tried with the Intel-ucode package installed) and an Nvidia Geforce 920M.

Edit: somehow installing kde plasma has fixed the issue

I’ve just installed Arch on my laptop and I’ve noticed the WiFi card seems to be generating a load of errors. I’m also dual booting Ubuntu server and it looks like that’s been generating similar logs although I’ve only ever used Ethernet on there:

Under Arch it has these 2 errors over and over again in journalctl:

Mar 31 00:38:58 Laptop kernel: ath10k_pci 0000:03:00.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Correctable, type=Data Link Layer, (Receiver ID)

Mar 31 01:13:08 Laptop kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: Correctable error message received from 0000:03:00.0

And under Ubuntu it has this instead:

Mar 30 23:28:22 Laptop kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: can't find device of ID00e5 Mar 30 23:28:22 Laptop kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: AER: Multiple Corrected error received: 0000:00:1c.5 Mar 30 23:28:22 Laptop kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, (Receiver ID) Mar 30 23:28:22 Laptop kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: device [8086:9d15] error status/mask=00000001/00002000 Mar 30 23:28:22 Laptop kernel: pcieport 0000:00:1c.5: [ 0] RxErr

Lspci detects the card as this:

03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 30) Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. QCA9377 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter Kernel driver in use: ath10k_pci Kernel modules: ath10k_pci

But the chip itself is labelled as a Qualcomm Atheros QCNFA435 (which matches what the laptop specs are listed as online)

As far as I can tell the WiFi is working properly, is there anything I should do to fix these errors in either distro or should I just add the pci=noaer parameter to suppress the messages?

I'm trying to install Arch on Btrfs but every time mkinitcpio runs it fails as shown in the attached screenshot. I've tried on the actual laptop which I'm trying to set up, and also on a couple of Hyper-V VMs set up as I usually do and I've never had this issue before. This happens when its run automatically after installing linux via pacstrap, and if I run it again while chrooted into the new system. If I format as ext4 instead I don't have any problems.

I have a single subvolume called root mounted at / and a fat32 volume mounted at /boot, and I'm using the latest arch install iso (2024.03.29). Any idea why this is happening? The Btrfs volume is on a single device so as far as I'm aware I don't need to add the btrfs module to mkinitcpio.conf

The past few times I’ve run yay I’ve got these warnings about packages that are orphaned/not in the AUR. Based on the names I’m assuming these are leftover from the upgrade from kde plasma 5 to 6, are these safe to remove now? And secondly how would I find orphaned packages like that if I wasn’t using yay since I never installed these from the AUR?

I needed a test VM at work the other day so I just went with Debian because why not, during the install I chose KDE plasma as the DE. I did nothing else with it after installing it and after leaving it alone for a while (somewhere between 20-60 minutes) the CPU useage shot up to the point vSphere sent out an alert and the VM was unresponsive (the web console just showed a blank console which I couldn't type in) It did this every time I booted the VM.

It seems to be the combination of vSphere Debian and KDE that causes this as I installed GNOME on the same VM and it was fine. I also created another Debian VM this time choosing GNOME during the install and that was also fine, until I installed KDE on that and then it started doing the same thing. I also created an Arch VM with KDE and that didn't have any issues.

Any idea why this combination causes issues? Journalctl output of the last boot from both Debian VMs below:

Original VM: https://text.is/032Z Secondary test VM: https://text.is/JR45

This is the page if anyone wants to check if its real: https://scalacube.com/blog/terraria/how-to-stop-corruption-in-terraria

I had to enable proton compatibillity to even get the game to detect the controller however even after doing that the analog stick won't go up. I tried enabling steam input but that didn't work either

My current setup is a NAS running on an old Acer Aspire laptop with an Intel core i5-6500u and 8GB RAM (and an Nvidia 920m but I'm pretty sure its not using that as I'm running headless Ubuntu server and haven't installed the Nvidia drivers) with a 3.5" HDD plugged in via USB.

The main things I like about this setup are that its cheap (I already own it), fairly low power, and pretty quiet. I guess the built in UPS is a bonus as well!

The main reason I want to upgrade is so I can easily add more drives, either for redundancy or just more storage. The USB can also be a bit janky, sometimes after first powering on it fails to read the drive and I have to power off the hard drive caddy for about a minute, this does seem to be an issue with the devices itself though as I've had it do it with multiple drives in multiple PC's. It would also be nice to get the laptop back even though I don't use it much.

Currently its just acting as a NAS, but I would definitely like to set up Jellyfin as well. I'm potentially interested in hosting my own private Lemmy or Matrix instance, however since that would involve exposing my network to the internet I'd need to be 100% sure I could set it up securely so I may not bother. I might also set up a Minecraft server in the future but I don't have any plans to do that soon.

With those use cases in mind I figured low power draw is probably more important than loads of computing power. I'm really tempted by the ASRock N100M with either 8 or 16GB RAM, its slightly more powerful than what I've got now while being based on much newer architecture with a lower power draw. I think it would also allow for hardware transcoding in Jellyfin that isn't supported by my current CPU? Also fanless seems like a bonus. I'd probably pair that with the Fractal Design Node 804 which would come to around £250 total plus whatever I spend on a PSU. That would let me start off with 2 drives (which I already own) and easily add more with a PCIe expansion card later, however I'm not sure what power supply would go with this. It wouldn't need much power but there doesn't seem to be many options below 500W. Also is it worth going for a higher power rating with an 80 plus gold rating for more efficiency and potentially less fan noise? I did look at PicoPSU as a low wattage alternative but by the time you buy a DC power supply for it they seem to be not far off the price of a proper PSU for something thats a lot less capable, probably less efficient and looks very Janky. The other option is to go for the N100DC-ITX instead of the N100M as it used DC power instead of needing an ATX PSU, however that would limit how many drives I can add in the future as I'd need to find a way of powering them.

I've also looked at single board computers as another low power alternative. I was tempted by the Zimaboard or Zima Blade but the CPU on those seems outdated and under powered (it would be a step down from what I already have) and that really would limit me to 2 drives maximum. I also looked at the Odroid H3/H3+ but they seem to cost just as much if not more than the N100 options and tbh I think the cases are quite ugly. I'd rather stick with x86 than ARM unless someone can convince me otherwise!

With what I've said above do you think its worth upgrading to any of those options (or any other suggestions) or should I just stick with what I've got until it dies? Power supply suggestions would also be appreciated!

I undervolted my CPU about a year ago and haven't had any issues with it till now. I've been dual booting Linux recently and noticed whenever I was in Linux it would crash/reboot after a couple of hours or less of using it. I noticed the behavior was similar to when I set the voltages too low when initially setting up the undervolt so I disabled it and haven't had any crashed since. Any idea why it would be stable on Windows but not Linux? I tried a couple of different distros as well. I'll probably just raise the voltage until I get it stable again but I'm interested to know what could cause this! If its relevant my CPU is a Ryzen 7 3800x

I use DisplayPort audio as my main output, and it seems there is a slight delay between the sink being started and me actually hearing anything (the audio isn't delayed I just miss the start). I've managed to mostly fix it by disabling suspend on idle, so now once I've played some audio once its fine.

However when I reboot I then miss the first bit of audio again. I have no idea what I need to do to fix this. If I try to manually enable the sink with with pacmd suspend 0 I still get the same issue. The only potential fix I can think of is to set a KDE startup command for pacmd play-file and point it to a very short silent audio file. Does anyone have any better ideas?

Edit: I forgot to mention, when suspend on idle is enabled there is an audible pop every time the audio starts and suspends. With suspend on idle disabled I still hear this pop on login (and the first time audio is played) which suggests something is happening when I log in

Edit 2: Apparently it still does it every time the audio stream switches to a different app, however if I start the second one playing before I pause the first it starts straight away

Apparently os-prober is a security risk but tbh I don't really understand the issue. I've read its something to do with mounting all partitions as root, but you have to run grub-mkconfig as root anyway so I don't see how that could be used to gain root privileges? Does it not unmount them afterwards? And could you avoid the risk by just disabling it again after you've generated your grub.cfg?

The other option seems to be manually adding a Windows entry to /etc/grub.d/40_custom so I assume thats the recommended way to dual boot?