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If you are a laptop user, you may want to avoid driver version 550 because there is a megathread on the NVIDIA forum where users are reporting that this version is making their distributions randomly crash.

Photos from my personal laptop last night after doing some reboots just for fun and testing (Arch Linux 6.9.1-zen + nvidia-dkms 550):


Crash right after decrypting the disk


Crash right before trying to load sddm

It does not follow a pattern. Sometimes the laptop boots, sometimes it crashes. I would say that in 40% of the times that I've tried to boot it crashed during this week.

The way it happens, you can't say for sure where nvidia module is poking around because sometimes the crash is related to vfs sometimes with rcu_schedule. It happened to me right after decrypting my secondary NVMe, but it also happened right before trying to launch sddm so it is pretty random. Some folks reported it happened during upgrades when udev was triggered, but I didn't have that more catastrophic version of this problem (yet), having to deal with the system running and maybe breaking my initrd or package database.

The available options to mitigate this situation are:

  1. Revert back to version 545 or 535 with dkms
  2. Use the beta version 555. It looks like it is stable enough from the standpoint of this bug.
  3. Use the following workaround involving disabling udev triggers and setting some kernel command line related to GSP firmware.

Nvidia Thread: Series 550 freezes laptop

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Beta, Drivers, Misc, NVIDIA
11 Likes
About the author -
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I'm and enthusiast of Linux on Laptops and Secure Boot related stuff. Playing exclusively on Linux since 2013. Played on Wine on dates that trace back to 2008(Diablo 2, Lineage 2...). A troubleshooter that used to work with strace and it is now working with Kubernetes...
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14 comments
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nwildner Jun 11
Quoting: TriasIt's sometimes very interesting (and frightening) to read through some logs. Like, look at Liam's first picture. If my notebook reported something like "[ 3.318673] ? __die_body.cold+..." I would sure be frightened... :).

That was MY laptop, not Liam's. :)

And yeah, it is frightening to see a _die_body.cold+0x8 all times and have to long press power at least 40% of the times until you have a sane boot.
hardpenguin Jun 13
From this place I would like to thank Debian developers for keeping the latest NVIDIA driver line out of Sid...
STiAT Jun 14
I just got mesa 24.1 on Fedora 40. And I dumped the Nvidia proprietary driver.

Performance is a bit less, but actually not bad, for my needs and games I currently play more than satisfying. Seems I'm finally done with the nvidia crapware.
STiAT Jun 16
Quoting: STiATI just got mesa 24.1 on Fedora 40. And I dumped the Nvidia proprietary driver.

Performance is a bit less, but actually not bad, for my needs and games I currently play more than satisfying. Seems I'm finally done with the nvidia crapware.

As a side-note, there are features missing required for a lot of modern games, and partially necessary for performance.

It's on the mesa issue tracker:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/9479

Some of those, as VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations is an issue for some games. So some games will struggle, some just won't depending on their engine (in example, KCD has huge performance issues - but it always was bad :D, WoW works perfectly well).

Horizon and Bannerlord 2 just crash due to an other issue which should be fixed in 24.2.

I expect we will see more and more features and better performance for more games over time. But not all is "perfect" now, for sure not in a state if you "just want to play", if you can live with just not playing some games for now it's fine.

Since I have a huge backlog on old titles - that's fine for me :D.


Last edited by STiAT on 16 June 2024 at 9:25 pm UTC
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