[gentoo-user] Re: Troubshooting AMD Radeon Vega system freeze

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2025-01-26, Daniel Frey <djqfrey@gmail.com> wrote:

> I had a problem with two of my Ryzen systems that exhibited this
> behaviour. One has a G processor, the other doesn't
>
> Apparently Ryzen processors have an idle bug that locks up the
> system in this way. The bugs manifests randomly when the CPU is
> idle. For me, if I left the PC on overnight it would always be hung
> up the next morning. It would also trigger if I started a long
> emerge and forgot about it - it would idle enough it would hang.

And that only hung user-space stuff?

I can still ping mine when it's frozen, and the SysRq key works
(except for commands to do with the framebuffer console).  Ssh doesn't
work and Ctrl-Alt-Fx doesn't work.

> I had to update the BIOS on both machines, then change the "Power Supply 
> Idle Control" to "Typical Current Idle". Any other setting and the bug 
> manifests. Note this setting is for Asus motherboards; I would imagine 
> other manufacturers have a similar setting but it may be named differently.
>
> I did test it, I left both my PCs on for over 48 hours and no lockup.

I don't think this is the same. My machine never locked up when idle.

It was always when doing something like resizing an X11 window.  I
could let it sit idle for days (either at the console prompt or with
X11 screen-saver active and a blanked screen). I could do anything I
wanted remotely via ssh.  It only seemed to lock up when I was doing
something in X11. It didn't have to be _much_ in X11 (didn't need to
be rendering video or 3D gaming). Just working with xemacs and xterms
seemed to be enough (though I probably had a Thunderbird window
sitting idle/iconified and a chrome window showing some
documentation).

Yesterday I downgraded mesa from 24.3.3 to 24.2.8, and it hasn't
frozen since -- though I also haven't been using it a lot since the
downgrade.  If make it through a day of work tomorrow without a
lockup, then I'm going to blame mesa. During a normal work day last
week it would usually freeze a half-dozen times.

--
Grant