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So I have to use MS Teams for working purposes. And yes, Teams has been working nicely recently on Ubuntu 20.04. Until yesterday, where I was sharing my screen through a Teams audio call and my whole system crashed. I mean: the operating system crashed. I could not even kill the process. Even if I would open a console (ctrl+alt+t) and sudo kill -9 for Teams, I would get no answer.

I tried even a sudo reboot now but nothing happended. The machine was stucked there, freezed; no response at all. In the end I hade to power-off/on the laptop with the power button.

So I know this is somehow a description of the situation but very weird in the end. As I have read in another post, Ha! Never know that an application running without root permission can crash you OS.

Well, I have these files under /var/crash:

lucas@lucas:/var/crash$ ll
total 325636
drwxrwsrwt  2 root     whoopsie      4096 feb 11 09:51 ./
drwxr-xr-x 14 root     root          4096 abr 23  2020 ../
-rw-r-----  1 lucas    whoopsie  47178713 feb 10 17:51 _usr_share_teams_teams.1000.crash
-rw-r--r--  1 lucas    whoopsie         0 feb 10 14:11 _usr_share_teams_teams.1000.upload
-rw-------  1 whoopsie whoopsie        37 feb 10 14:11 _usr_share_teams_teams.1000.uploaded

And I'm using Teams version :

lucas@lucas:/var/crash$ apt list teams
Listing... Done
teams/stable,now 1.3.00.30857 amd64 [installed]
N: There are 5 additional versions. Please use the '-a' switch to see them.

Has anyone experienced something like this before? Any hint or idea/suggestion?

Thanks.

Lucas Aimaretto
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    Whilst the kernel should protect your machine from user space programs like Teams its entirely possible that simply that Teams is causing the machine to hang. That could be due to the GPU/Graphics card or even Memory.

    it sounds in this instance like Teams is stuck inside some kernel context and its deadlocked inside the kernel.

     – Simon Banks Feb 11 '21 at 16:35
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    Thinking about it the most obvious candidate for unstable desktops is Wayland.

    Try disabling waylaid using this guide and hopefully it might make your machine more stable.

    https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-enable-disable-wayland-on-ubuntu-20-04-desktop

     – Simon Banks Feb 11 '21 at 16:36
  • @SimonBanks, I'm not using Wayland. echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE returns x11. On the other hand, I have 40G of RAM, so still I don't think it's an issue with memory. I'll keep an eye on Teams since unfortunately I have to use for communicating with my colleagues ... You mentioned kernel: I'm using kernerl 5.4. A newer kernel could solve this may be? – Lucas Aimaretto Feb 11 '21 at 19:02
  • OK thats great another think checked off..

    When I mean memory I meant a hardware fault (defective or badly seated) SIM cards. Though normally with RAM errors its not quite so reproducible as this. You'd see random processes falling over normally.

    Kernel itself isn't the issue but the drivers (aka kernel modules) maybe.. Linux is notorious for video driver support issues from companies.

    What gpu/chipset are you using for your display?

     – Simon Banks Feb 12 '21 at 08:22
  • Also if you were running our of ram (possible with even 40GB ;-), it wouldn't lock up in the kernel.. It would bail with ENOMEM.. But thats not what I meant.. See earlier post.. – Simon Banks Feb 12 '21 at 08:23
  • So, in terms of GPU, I'm using the Intel UHD Graphics 620 (Whiskey Lake). As far as your other comment, no, I don't see random process falling normally. It's only with Teams. – Lucas Aimaretto Feb 12 '21 at 12:39
  • Still happening? It started crashing to me too. Randomly but pretty often. – Edge7 Jun 01 '21 at 18:51

2 Answers2

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I turned off GPU hardware acceleration in the Teams client settings and had no problems since. Teams also seems to use less CPU...

Teams 1.4.00.7556

BeastOfCaerbannog
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Arie
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  • +1 Thanks! That did the trick for me. I didn't experience crashing, but teams just hung when restarted unless I deleted .config/Microsoft* and went through the laborious login process again. – copper.hat Sep 21 '21 at 18:29
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I experience the same crash / freezing on my laptop showing two displays (built-in plus external monitor). I have learned I am able to recover by unplugging the additional monitor, and then teams became responsive after a few seconds. I typically then kill Teams and restart the app. To me, this could be a combination of GPU driver and Teams resource demands.

Teams v 1.4.00.7556 amd64 x11 Ubuntu 20.04

nemaroller
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