Details

Roughly every 14-20 days Sometimes I walk away from my desktop for a bit, and come back to the same problem:

• the system is at a console (not Xorg, as it was when I left)
• the console has no text; only a gray square in the top-left and the mouse cursor added by moused on a VT.

System info:

• Ryzen 7 2700
• 48GB RAM
• 1TB SSD

Here's all the information I have:

• It happens every 14-20 days. (It happened on both August 18 and 19 2021, less than 24 hours apart.)
• It's happened at least 7 times.
• It has never happened while anyone is looking at the display.
• When it happens, Xorg is pegged at 100% CPU usage, and I can not kill processes (even with kill -9 <PID> or pkill -9 <NAME>), but e.g. running exit from inside bash will cause it to exit.
• If I catch it early enough, I can ssh in from my phone and shutdown -r now. But I've only managed this once.
• I know for a fact nobody is locally tampering with my system (and there's no animals/pets to do so).
• If it is left alone long enough, the logs eventually say it runs out of swap, then 75-85 processes are terminated, which is notable for being nearly every freaking process on the system.
• The logs show most of them being killed the same second, but I suspect there is some logging delay introduced by whatever is happening.