VM pauses for unknown reason

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C8Z06

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Sep 2, 2022
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Hi all. Thanks in advance for any pointers you can give me. I am fairly new to a lot of this and don't know what I don't know. : )

I have a debian VM that I run Plex server on. I have had no issues for months but a few days ago I passed a GPU through. Everything worked fine, but since then the VM has been pausing once or twice a day and I don't know why. I have to manually restart it. I do have a daily backup job but this is happening at times other than then.

What logs or things should I be looking at?

I just did a apt update and upgrade as well as reboot the proxmox host. I will keep an eye on it but i suspect it will do it again.
 
Hi,

C8Z06 said:
VM has been pausing once or twice a day
Click to expand...

does it fully freeze? What kind of behavior can you observe?

C8Z06 said:
What logs or things should I be looking at?
Click to expand...
The first step would be to look at the system logs using journalctl. For instance: After you've restarted the VM after a freeze, execute journalctl --boot -1 -e in the VM. This gives you the system log messages from the last boot (--boot -1), starting at the most recent (-e for end) ones. In other words, the messages that occured right before the freeze.

It might also be worth checking out the system log for your PVE host

Hope this helps.
 
THANK YOU! This is a cool command, I am going to look into it more. I assumed the -1 meant how many boots ago and changed it to -2, -3 until I found one where the issue existed (I had rebooted, or backup had suspended it a couple times since the last issue). I found this:

Dec 11 01:14:52 plex systemd[1]: Starting NVIDIA system suspend actions...
Dec 11 01:14:52 plex suspend[1109]: nvidia-suspend.service
Dec 11 01:14:52 plex logger[1109]: <13>Dec 11 01:14:52 suspend: nvidia-suspend.service

Last night, I was pondering what was happening and thought to myself "if this was a windows machine, I would suspect a sleep setting". So, I googled and found someone who mentioned editing /etc/systemd/sleep.conf and changing:

AllowSuspend=no
AllowHibernation=no

I did this last night and rebooted. This morning the VM is still up!

Any further suggestions for the sake of doing things in the most correct way?

THANKS!
 
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Great!
Out of curiosity: what kind of distribution are you running Plex on? Some kind of desktop distribution with a GUI?
 
On Debian 11 with Gnome 3.38.6. If I had known that the pass through of the GPU would have prevented me from seeing the GUI in the console I would have made the effort to install it without gnome. When I first started all this, that is the first ISO I downloaded and haven't attempted to change.
 
Ah, yes, then GNOME is the culprit here. Suspending a system after a period of no user interaction is AFAIK the job of the desktop environment on GNU/Linux.

Btw, you can mark the thread as "solved" by editing it! :)
 
I have Ubuntu running on a vm that isn't doing that. But, perhaps it has something to do with how ProxMox is interacting with the VM that keeps that from happening? And combining that with the way my Nvidia GPU pass through has removed the VM from the console. Do you have an opinion about the way I prevented it from happening?
 
Hey again,

C8Z06 said:
I have Ubuntu running on a vm that isn't doing that.
Click to expand...

I just checked, Ubuntu has "automatic suspend" disabled by default (System Settings -> Power). On Debian 11 with Gnome 3.38 on the other hand it is enabled - which I happen to know because that's what I'm running on my workstation and I also did run into some issues with automatic suspend :)

C8Z06 said:
And combining that with the way my Nvidia GPU pass through has removed the VM from the console.
Click to expand...
What do you mean by that?
 
As soon you want to used a vm for task specific.. it's quite always best to avoid putting gnome. As it's only for supposed fancy looking and just eating resource and having bad config. Put Xfce and all is good.
 
l.wagner said:
On Debian 11 with Gnome 3.38 on the other hand it is enabled
Click to expand...
That is good to know! Do you think I turned it off in the right place?

l.wagner said:
What do you mean by that?
Click to expand...
When I setup the GPU pass through and followed the instructions I found, the console in ProxMox now only has a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top. There is no longer a GUI showing. I assumed that this was due to the way the pass through worked, or possibly a setting I selected during the config. I didn't worry too much about it because I just SSH into the machine and don't use the GUI anyway.
 
C8Z06 said:
When I setup the GPU pass through and followed the instructions I found, the console in ProxMox now only has a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top. There is no longer a GUI showing. I assumed that this was due to the way the pass through worked, or possibly a setting I selected during the config. I didn't worry too much about it because I just SSH into the machine and don't use the GUI anyway.
Click to expand...
This is normal. Your VM will use the GPU that you've passed through for its output instead of the virtual GPU provided by PVE/QEMU, which is displayed in the "Console" tab. If you were to attach a display to the GPU, you should probably see the GUI of your VM there.
 
I suspected that but didn't try it. Since you mentioned it though I did try it just now - cool! I guess I could pass keyboard and mouse through to the VM and have a full experience haha. Fun stuff!
 
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Warning!!! noob alert

I have a similar issue.

I have installed the latest version of porxmox, updated to 7.3-4, i have the community repository active, the none subscription. i had the same issue before i enabled these.

i have installed a windows 11 pro vm with gou passthrough to this vm. The GPU is a Nvidia Quadro K4000. it works really well actually better than on my ESXi 8 test. So loving it.

the issue i have now though is, when i try and install my Linux mint vm (LM 21.1 Cinnamon x74) i get a black screen after the mint logo appears. The live cd is booting because if i suspend the vm it does this instantly. i just cannot see anything via the console, i get a black screen.

As said above my Win 11 pro vm also shows a black screen which as you say i found out was due to the passthrough of the GPU to the vm as i connected a screen to the proxmox server and can see the windows login window.

So my question is why is my Linus Mint showing a black screen on installation when the VM configuration is bog standard, basically next next and next? this worked for the 1st install i did but after deleting that vm, because i did not like the password on boot up, i now can't install another Linux Mint vm.

A Windows 10 pro install works fine.


Update:

Well i resolved the issue by using the VirtIO-GPU :oops:
 
Last edited:
Cloudboy said:
Warning!!! noob alert

I have a similar issue.

I have installed the latest version of porxmox, updated to 7.3-4, i have the community repository active, the none subscription. i had the same issue before i enabled these.

i have installed a windows 11 pro vm with gou passthrough to this vm. The GPU is a Nvidia Quadro K4000. it works really well actually better than on my ESXi 8 test. So loving it.

the issue i have now though is, when i try and install my Linux mint vm (LM 21.1 Cinnamon x74) i get a black screen after the mint logo appears. The live cd is booting because if i suspend the vm it does this instantly. i just cannot see anything via the console, i get a black screen.

As said above my Win 11 pro vm also shows a black screen which as you say i found out was due to the passthrough of the GPU to the vm as i connected a screen to the proxmox server and can see the windows login window.

So my question is why is my Linus Mint showing a black screen on installation when the VM configuration is bog standard, basically next next and next? this worked for the 1st install i did but after deleting that vm, because i did not like the password on boot up, i now can't install another Linux Mint vm.

A Windows 10 pro install works fine.


Update:

Well i resolved the issue by using the VirtIO-GPU :oops:
Click to expand...
Did you check to make sure you’re not passing a GPU through to the VM?
 
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