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  • Constant Display Driver crashes

Hello,

Since November, I've had a quite annoying issues. I would get random display drivers crashes. It would manifest with a display freeze. The mouse cursor and sound would work for a few seconds and then seize working as well. It was happening with any app (internet browser, video, video games, folder browser, LibreOffice), but was rather rare (about once a day, maybe less). I then needed to do a hard reset to get out of that freeze.

Recently (about a week ago), the frequency of these crashes has risen dramatically. I now have about a dozen of crashes a day. The worse is if I play a video : the display crashes every 2-3 minutes.

If memory serves me right, I've had a similar issue a couple of years ago (also constant crashes, and on top of that, everything was very slow), and it seemed to be related to the fact I only have an integrated GPU.

Here is my system info :

  • CPU : AMD Ryzen 3 3200 (3,6ghz)
  • RAM : 2x8 gb
  • Integrated graphics Vega 8
  • Solus 4.7 with Budgie

If you need more information, feel free to ask !

    Dan_igrok This could just be some fluff buildup in your cooling path. The symptoms certainly fit with that kind of behaviour anyway.
    Try this.
    Maybe just feel around a bit, is anything getting hot that didn't used to?
    Hope this helps.
    Edit: Also make sure that cooling air is not being obstructed by external obstacles for eg knee covering air vent or sitting with laptop on a cushion (lots of people do this, honest!).
    CPU and GPU temperatures can be quickly checked with inxi -s

      I don't think cooling is the issue. I clean my CPU fan regularly (it's a mini desktop PC, not a laptop).
      The telemetry currently shows a steady 42°C.

      Moreover, the crashes do not occur when I'm doing demanding work on the computer. It can happen when I switch tabs on the web browser, when I launch Steam, when I switch pages in a Libre Calc worksheet. It does seem to happen quite often with full screen video playing (while windowed video makes it happen less often).

      It would be interesting to know whether it is Solus specific or a hardware problem.

      Does it behave like this with other operating systems too?

        AlphaElwedritsch

        I am actually dual booting with another Linux distro (Manjaro KDE). I hadn't used it in a long time, but I did yesterday evening. I've had no crashes during that session. I've played a movie without any crashes. While on Solus, it would make the system crash at least 3 times.

          What Kernel is Manjaro on I believe the AMD video drivers are in the Kernel.

          This issue is not Solus specific. Your hardware should also be OK.

          It's a Mesa/Linux-Kernel bug which haunts Raven class AMD GPUs since Mesa 24.3.x. You can look up the details here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/12310.

          The good news: This issue has already been solved in Mesa. Some distros (arch) are already patching their mesa 24.3.x. Other distros are still on Mesa 25.2.x and won't update to anything else in the near future (debian bookworm).

          The bad news: The fix was merged into Mesa 25.0.x branches and it's hard to tell when Mesa v25 will be released. Roadmap suggests 1 month from now. And Solus Team will not apply the patch, I guess (though it's only 5 lines if code).

            fernkaufmann And Solus Team will not apply the patch, I guess

            What makes you think that? Has anyone brought it to their attention? (best way would be the issue tracker)

                I'm not an expert on this, so where can I report this issue with your patch link?

                  13 days later

                  • Harvey

                  • Post #13
                  • Edited

                  Mesa will not be updated to 25.0.0. To quote the release notes:

                  Mesa 25.0.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 25.0.1.

                  We pretty much always wait for the .1

                  Patched 24.3.4 for this issue and cherry-picked it to stable. Please update, reboot and report any further issues.