Unpredictable freezing with Debian 12 on Dell Latitude 7490
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I'm having freezing problems with my Debian 12 install on a Dell Latitude 7490 laptop.
The screen will freeze and become unresponsive. Moving the mouse during the freeze will cause the keyboard backlight to turn back on if it's off, but nothing happens on the screen. This happens both mid-use and before login, whether in TTY or GUI, and whether in normal mode or recovery mode. I have LUKS, and I haven't noticed it happening before I enter encryption key, though. The only way around seems to be a force shutdown -> reboot, but the problem will almost always just happen again shortly after next boot. My system is honestly more or less unusable right now because of this.
At first, I didn't see this happening when I was plugged into AC at work or at home, but since some of the changes that I've tried (below), freezing now seems to happen regardless of battery or AC.
I've tried a number of things:
1) Update kernel from 6.1.* -> 6.12.33 via backports.
2) Update firmware drivers similarly.
3) Change BIOS settings (disabled C-States, disabled Intel SpeedShift, disabled SpeedStep, disabled TurboBoost; basically disabled every intel performance option besides multi core and hyper threading). I also have secure boot turned disabled, but that was to solve a different problem.
4) Set
intel_idle.max_cstate=0
also tried setting to 1) and intel_iommu=off
in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
.
Right now, I'm using bookworm with the 6.12.33 kernel from backports, Wayland, and iwd + Network manager.
Here's a link to a journalctl dump from a hang:
[https://paste.c-net.org/GoldbergLined](https://paste.c-net.org/GoldbergLined)
The problem in [this Mint forum thread](https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=432757) seems to be quite similar to mine, but no resolution.
Thanks for your help!
Asked by user1507246
(1 rep)
Aug 5, 2025, 07:52 PM