Steam/Some apps causing X freeze

Eniax · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 23

I followed the guide to make steam work on Gentoo and things have been mostly fine, except in some cases it'll freeze up the desktop entirely.

Sound, etc will still play, but X is totally locked except the mouse. I can get into a terminal with ctrl+alt+F1 but if I got back to F7, the screen is totally black, but the mouse is available and registers when I hover over a clickable link, edge of a box for resizing, etc.

The only resolution I've found is a hard reboot which sucks because then I lose all the work in whatever applications I had before.

Here is my team startup/shutdown log: https://paste.pound-python.org/show/9zTgqfSaD3RhBJplsKMT/

Nvidia driver version: 390.42
X server version: 1.19.5 (11905000)

Kernel version 4.14.12.

Please let me know if I can provide any further information.

Thanks

audiodef · Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 1:44 pm Post subject:

You mentioned "some cases," so the first thing I'd like to know is whether specific actions cause the screen to black out.
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Eniax · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 23

audiodef · Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 4:26 pm Post subject:

This might not be helpful, but when I had a working Steam installation on Gentoo, I used the steam overlay and emerged the steam client and thereafter Steam updates were self-managed as they are on Windows. Did you do it this way?
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Eniax · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 23

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

As a standard question, is this problem reproducible on an untainted kernel?

Eniax · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 23

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

Proprietary drivers taint the kernel. You would need to test with Nouveau. You should be able to install both Nouveau and nVidia proprietary drivers side-by-side, and pick one at boot time.

Eniax · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 23

audiodef · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2018 12:19 pm Post subject:

Although I am not an expert, I have some experience with Nvidia vs. Nouveau. If you really want good 3D and smooth framerates, you are better off getting the Nvidia drivers to work.

When I did manual kernel configs years ago, I occasionally ran into freezes/crashes/lockups with Nvidia and X, and it was always a matter of kernel modules and drivers. Now that I use genkernel (which still allows for complete control via --menuconfig) I don't have those issues.

So my advice is:

* genkernel the latest stable gentoo-sources-4.9, leave the defaults for now

* recompile latest nvidia-drivers against that (I have done this and the above step, this should work.) Do this by putting VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia" in make.conf and running emerge -uDN world

* eselect opengl nvidia

* eselect opencl nvidia

* restart X

* make sure the Nvidia drivers are loaded and working. If glxgears runs and nvidia-settings runs, success. glxgears will not run if 3D glx is not present and nvidia-settings will complain if the drivers are not in use

* run a non-Steam game that needs 3D. Doom3 demo, maybe?

* if all is good so far, play your Steam games. If you have issues at this point, you know it's Steam because you've proven that your system/Nvidia driver setup works.

Hope this helps.
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Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

Due to ongoing non-cooperation from nVidia, the Nouveau driver isn't as good as many people would like. The nVidia proprietary drivers will likely give you better performance, if you can tolerate the considerable downsides they bring:

Sometimes incompatible with current kernels, requiring custom patches to get working
Sometimes responsible for severe brokenness, as reported here
May drop support for cards before the cards age out of useful life

Eniax · n00b Joined: 06 Feb 2018 Posts: 23

After some further testing, I find it to be intermittent. I switched steam to the steam-launcher from the overlay listed in the wiki guide. This version allows me to launch the steam client consistently in a variety of scenarios that previously caused issues without any freezing. Sometimes I can get a freeze if I open a bunch of apps like spotify/code::blocks etc quickly which definitely makes me think this is a driver issue.

Some games work, some don't. Namely Dota2 and Counter-Strike (i guess valve stuff works well) launch without issue. They seem to work without any problems, and must be launched from the client.

Witcher 3 requires a bunch of libraries I don't have installed so I didn't test that one.

Cities:skylines, and other games that have a steam prompt prior to launch will freeze the X server. Ones that ask about resolution, leveraging the beta version, etc.

System Shock 2 works, but only launched from the directory with the global version of wine rather than whatever version steam packages with it.

I was unable to downgrade my nvidia driver to the 387.xx that's still stable due to some error, something about gpl_intel (don't exactly recall) so I spose i'll stick with this one for now and mask any updates.