22 july 2021
Spent some time with a friend today, helped them draft a plan for getting mental health issues addressed since their mom isn't doing anything to help. Hopefully it works out.
Still dealing with GPU-related crashes. It's getting really annoying now. Still trying to find a fix of some sort. It's been 3 days in a row this time when normally it's once or twice a week. Apparently this is an AMD GPU thing that just happens and is still trying to be pinpointed. Nothing has worked yet. Kernel downgrades, driver changes, firmware downgrades, changing kernel parameters, you name it. Just stuck with our screen freezing and going to black after a while. It's frustrating. May need to get into using qutebrowser as our main web browser because Firefox sets it off more often than most things (though it's not Firefox-specific). Been using qutebrowser a bit and it's alright, just miss bookmarks. The Vim bindings are nice though. Ugh, just tired of this issue. It's been months with no fixes we could find despite a lot of research and experimentation. It's definitely a kernel issue from what we've found, which means we're waiting for a fix. But it's near-impossible to reproduce intentionally.
Sway is set up the way we like it now at least. Looks good.
Update: Trying yet another fix that has worked for some people. Turning off GPU DPM, will see if that does anything. Some people had success with it and one guy thinks it's a power management problem, so we'll see if this does anything. Going to use normally and see if a crash happens since that's really the only way to test it. It's weirdly sporadic.
Hey, another plus side to this. We're getting good at finding obscure forum threads and messing with kernel parameters. Maybe we'll learn something. Also interesting: the GPU model itself is definitely relevant. Most people with this same issue (us included) have an AMD Radeon Vega and/or Ryzen CPU. Have yet to see an NVIDIA user have this issue.
Update: VICTORY!!! It still froze for a second, but IT RECOVERED THIS TIME! The active window was visually funky but the others are fine, and closing it solved the issue there. But the key is that we're still using the computer without a hard reboot! I'll take it, dangit! That confirms it's a power management issue, too. It was a few lines added to kernel configs. For the record, yes, the solution was in the Arch wiki. :') The lines in question for anyone else having this issue were: amdgpu.vm_update_mode=3 radeon.dpm=0 radeon.cik_support=0 radeon.si_support=0 amdgpu.cik_support=1 amdgpu.si_support=1
That's what we added this time and we're still typing right after a crash happened! I don't mind visual weirdness as long as the computer is usable; at least we can troubleshoot that without a restart.
But holy shit guys, this is exciting. We've been dealing with this interupting everything for months. It forced us to do hard restarts at least weekly because it would just crash to black with an unresponsive caps lock key and no tty access, all without any warning. It was annoying as hell and we've finally made progress after trying fix after fix from obscure forum threads. It's about time!
Time to go add this to the computer documentation notebook in case we ever need to do this again.