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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Perfect timing buying an AMD card yesterday to replace my old NVidia. Installed today, works like a champ. Issue resolved
I've had a mixed experience with my newer AMD card, and that's being charitable.
To be fair AMD closed-source drivers were much worse
That doesn't surprise me in the slightest
Oh those times were truly horrible.
What were some of the positives and negatives? Me personally, I have an RDNA2 card and got bitten by the gamma being too dark on hardware cursors (now resolved) and memory clock stuck at 1 GHz with some refresh rates (workaround is not to use refresh above ~144 Hz).
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
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.).
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
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
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.
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
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.
I have an RDNA3 card (upgraded from a 1080) and am running a multi-boot triple-head setup with mixed refresh rates (60, 144).
Pros: most things work and work well. Installation of the physical card went without a hitch and it was relatively simple to install the drivers. No issues with web video, streaming, video encoding, or standard use.
Cons: mesa, amdgpu, and Windows drivers are all lacking significant features - I am still unable to reliably control fan curves/speeds, clock speeds, etc. FreeSync is unusable as well. I have also been experiencing regular crashes on certain games (BG3, Apex Legends, etc.) and support has been nonexistent, despite similar complaints from other users. When the card does crash, it usually results in a ring timeout and an accompanied total session crash. AMD does not seem to be responsive to these issues in either their official forum or any other space where people are lodging complaints.
The hardware seems fine; the drivers are the main issue. If I had to do it over again, I'd hold my nose and buy NVIDIA.
EDIT: regarding the cursor issue, I've had to switch to a software cursor on Linux. The hardware cursor wasn't showing up at all.
Regarding game-specific issues, it seems a lot of problems stem from either a greedy low power mode or DirectX issues. I've had to set udev rules to alleviate some of my issues, but it hasn't solved everything.
EDIT 2: For anyone who comes across this post, it seems like the vast majority of the crashes on linux have been resolved as of kernel 6.7. Still lacking fine-grained control over fans/clocks, but stability seems much improved.
The ring issues are killing me right now on my Radeon 680M. This isn't brought up enough when people talk about using AMD on Linux.
Odd, Freesync should work for you though? What's the issue you're experiencing?
Agreed, AMD is not perfect, it's still an arguably better experience than Nvidia, but it's still not great at times
I don't really see the better experience to be honest. Sure, AMD is a lot better on laptops, but on desktops I still prefer Nvidia. DLSS, raytracing, Optix, CUDA are all killer features that I need that AMD doesn't really have an answer for. Sure Wayland is great, but it doesn't outweigh the disadvantages of not having those technologies.
Meanwhile both my AMD GPUs (Vega 64 and Radeon 680M) have been crash happy with gfx timeouts and ring0 errors.
It was inconsistently causing gamma flickering with certain fullscreen applications. I haven't seen it since disabling it on my monitor.
Are you using wayland by any chance? Freesync was also causing flickering when i was trying out wayland recently, so i guess i'll be staying on xorg lol.
Nope, X and i3 here.
Ah, that's unfortunate, was worth a shot.
So the cursor really was darker! It seemed that way after switching to a new laptop, but I wasn't sure.
There's been some oddball nasty issues with Mesa recently. SteamVR causing the driver to crash (and the display just won't come back :/) H265 encoding causing driver crashing, just weird stuff. Simple things like Wayland work great, but if you have even a slightly unique workload you may run into major issues
I've had lost of issues with SteamVR too but not with anything else. I suspect those issues are actually SteamVR's fault tho because it's pretty buggy on Linux in general.
Nah, straight up driver crashes are on Mesa's side, not SteamVR's. No userland software should be able to permanently bring down your driver.