The system becomes completely unresponsive. CapsLock is blinking (kernel panic, I guess?). No reaction on keyboard shortcuts to switch to TTY or to kill X11.
I found three scenarios that lead to such behavior:
When I try to log out of the current user. This is the most common scenario: system hangs on 4-5 log out after reboot.
It happened once when I tried to restart the system.
It happened once when I was loading the Steam game.
I looked through the journalctl log and found nothing I could blame - all the errors and warnings logged are constantly present. No new or specific errors or warnings appear right before the system breaks.
This is not a GNOME issue since it also happened with KDE. The first time it appeared was around a month ago when I installed OpenSUSE from scratch to give KDE6 a try.
This is not an issue specific to some particular kernel version since it happened with 6.8.X and 6.9.1 kernels.
Hardware: laptop with i7-9750H and RTX 2070 Max-Q. I’ve been using it for the last several years.
Any ideas what could it be? What logs should I check?
This is an update for those who have similar issues.
It’s safe to say that the problem is associated with 55X NVIDIA drivers. It’s being discussed at NVIDIA and Arch forums for quite a long time. There is no final solution at this point, workarounds only. They are:
install open kernel modules;
downgrade the NVIDIA driver to 545 or earlier;
try the workaround provided by one of the users at the NVIDIA forum.
It had also been reported that 555 beta drivers do not resolve the issue.