How to collect data on OS freeze when nothing is being written to system logs?

[Doug0915]

Here is my attempt to improve the grammar and clarity of the post:

I have a rather perplexing problem.

I can reliably reproduce a system-wide freeze whenever Firefox has hardware acceleration enabled and a specific YouTube video is played. When I turn off hardware acceleration, the issue does not occur.

After the OS freezes (unrecoverable, no virtual consoles available), Xorg or Wayland becomes completely unresponsive and I cannot SSH into the system.

There are no relevant error messages in the kernel log or syslog.

What should I do next to collect more debugging information? Are there additional logging or debugging options I could enable?

It seems there are two distinct issues here:

1. The initial trigger appears to be Firefox with hardware acceleration enabled playing a specific video.

2. However, whatever Firefox is doing should not be able to completely hang the kernel and prevent SSH access.

I would like to collect more detailed logging so that developers have additional data to help investigate the root causes.

Any assistance is appreciated! Any suggestions or maybe I should post in another sub-forum?

thanks

[dragonfly41]

In past freeze case I did find that Firefox extensions were the cause and/or too many tabs open.

You might test this theory by having multiple firefox profiles.

One stripped back bare bone profile with no extensions enabled and minimal open tabs to test for freezes.

If there is a particular problematic YouTube video does it work in Brave browser, for example, without freezing? Just plodding detective work.

[MAFoElffen]

To run a stack trace on Firefox, start Firefox like this:

snap run --strace firefox | tee ./firefox.strace

Ensure wherever you create that file has lots of room. That is going to generate lots of data. You will see everything that is happening to it.