20.04 CPU soft lock on insmod

I am running 20.04 on a Dell XPS 9315. I have noticed some strange freezes with my machine where the laptop slows to a halt for a minute and them comes back to life. It happens in frequently enough that I just deal with it (once or twice a week).

However, when trying to build and insert some kernel modules, the laptop completely hangs, DMSG outputs random large negative numbers and eventually I receive a: watchdog: cpu#x stuck for 23s! error.

I cannot find a usb to run memtest but I ran memtester and it seemed to pass with flying colors.

I have 2GB or Swap and 16GB RAM. I have a sneaking feeling it is not a physical hardware issue given the infrequency and the fact that insmod works in a VM on the machine.

I have tried updating bios, nothing seems to fix this. here is some output.

free -h

total used free shared buff/cache available

Mem: 15Gi 2.0Gi 10Gi 391Mi 2.4Gi 12Gi

Swap: 2.0Gi 0B 2.0Gi

uname -a

Linux XXXXXXX-XPS-9315 5.14.0-1054-oem #61-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 14 13:05:50 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

sysctl vm.swappiness

vm.swappiness = 60

  *-firmware                
       description: BIOS
       vendor: Dell Inc.
       physical id: 1
       version: 1.6.1
       date: 11/22/2022
       size: 1MiB
       capacity: 32MiB
       capabilities: pci pnp upgrade shadowing cdboot bootselect edd int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer acpi usb smartbattery biosbootspecification netboot uefi
  *-cache:0
       description: L1 cache
       physical id: 705
       slot: L1 Cache
       size: 512KiB
       capacity: 512KiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back instruction
       configuration: level=1
  *-cache:1
       description: L2 cache
       physical id: 706
       slot: L2 Cache
       size: 4MiB
       capacity: 4MiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=2
  *-cache:2
       description: L3 cache
       physical id: 707
       slot: L3 Cache
       size: 12MiB
       capacity: 12MiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=3
  *-cache:0
       description: L1 cache
       physical id: 700
       slot: L1 Cache
       size: 96KiB
       capacity: 96KiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back data
       configuration: level=1
  *-cache:1
       description: L1 cache
       physical id: 701
       slot: L1 Cache
       size: 64KiB
       capacity: 64KiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back instruction
       configuration: level=1
  *-cache:2
       description: L2 cache
       physical id: 702
       slot: L2 Cache
       size: 2560KiB
       capacity: 2560KiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=2
  *-cache:3
       description: L3 cache
       physical id: 703
       slot: L3 Cache
       size: 12MiB
       capacity: 12MiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified
       configuration: level=3
  *-cache:4
       description: L1 cache
       physical id: 704
       slot: L1 Cache
       size: 256KiB
       capacity: 256KiB
       capabilities: synchronous internal write-back data
       configuration: level=1
  *-memory
       description: System Memory
       physical id: 1000
       slot: System board or motherboard
       size: 16GiB
     *-bank:0
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 0
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:1
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 1
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:2
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 2
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:3
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 3
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:4
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 4
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:5
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 5
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:6
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 6
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
     *-bank:7
          description: Row of chips Synchronous 6400 MHz (0.2 ns)
          product: H9JKNNNFB3AECR-N6H
          physical id: 7
          slot: Motherboard
          size: 2GiB
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 2105MHz (0.5ns)
  *-memory UNCLAIMED
       description: RAM memory
       product: Intel Corporation
       vendor: Intel Corporation
       physical id: 14.2
       bus info: pci@0000:00:14.2
       version: 01
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz (30.3ns)
       capabilities: pm cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: iomemory:600-5ff iomemory:600-5ff memory:607a298000-607a29bfff memory:607a2a3000-607a2a3fff