Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA’s default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author’s intent.

Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being. They ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6+ thwarts their kernel driver.

  • hschen@sopuli.xyz
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    10 months ago

    I had an rx480 that worked fantasic until a firmware update made it start freezing my pc in games after suspend, solution was to rollback that package to an older one or never use suspend. I currently have a 6650xt and that just crashes whenever it wants to sometimes, works fine for a few months then decides to freeze my whole pc, playing bg3 atm it froze on me like 3 times already

    • Psy-Q@feddit.ch
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      10 months ago

      Ah, I just upgraded from RX580 to 6600XT and haven’t had any freezes so far. On RX580 I sometimes had games that managed to freeze the system complete with random pixel noise and VRAM fragments shown on screen for seconds before it rebooted, but that was a long time back and only on bleeding-edge Mesa and Proton Experimental so my own fault.

      Mesa 22 and 23 have been great so far. Maybe the firmware got more stable as well (I’m on Debian). I’d definitely recommend an RDNA2 card over any Nvidia today despite some of these hiccups.

      The GTX 1070 in my other machine has given me more headaches (kernel modules not compatible with newer kernels, random Vulkan issues resulting in broken shaders showing nonsense like sparkles or black areas, etc.).

      • hschen@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        My rx 480 worked way better in terms of not crashing, it did have graphical glitches in games but i guessed thats down to using Wine. Im also using Arch so maybe that in combination with the 6650 is making it more unstable, i gotta revert to using LTS kernel every few months to stop my system crashing randomly

      • hschen@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        I dont have the error message atm unfortunately cause to have more disk space i set my system to delete the logs quite often (ill probably revert this now as ive got way more space), but the one part i do have is this “GCVM_L2_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS” , thats 95% of the times the error that shows up whenever my pc freezes

        I looked it up and theres a bunch of mesa bugtracker issues listing the same error but honestly gpu driver stuff is so complex who knows whats really going on. baldurs gate 3 has crashed my whole system 3 times in 20-30 hours played, but except for that this past month ive also started getting blackscreens waking up from suspend sometimes on the non LTS kernel, luckily LTS fixes that for now, but not baldurs gate. The past year i’ve had this gpu theres been like 5 times where an update made the amd drivers unstable and ive had to change back to the LTS kernel to resolve it, maybe thats cause im using arch and stuff is more bleeding edge, but i havent had this many issues on my rx 480

    • jack@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      I’ve had over twenty crashes in BG3 at this point. Crashing soeems to be more prevalent in certain areas of the game - Grymforge, especially.

      • hschen@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        Is your entire system crashing?, for me i have to do a hard reboot once it happens. if it gets too bad i can always play the game in a windows VM as im playing with a friend and crashing all the time would be annoying

        • jack@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          On Linux it’s usually just X that completely crashes and I get kicked back to login, but I’ve had more than one hard crash.

          Windows will usually just crash to desktop and close any hardware-accelerated applications. Have also had the odd hard crash here.