Starting with Kernel 6.12 i get some odd Freezes that seem to be related to Kwin (at least that is my assumption since the Taskbar freezes).
So far i only noticed it when playing a Nintendo 64 game in Retroarch using the Mupen emulator, something that worked fine before. Now from time to time the game would just freeze. I then can tab out and see that the taskbar has freeze as well. However i still can bring up the terminal via hotkeys or using Firefox. When checking the journal by journalctl -p7 basically nothing shows up that indicates any issue. I also checked out dmesg yet also nothing. Only thing i seem to be able to do is rebooting the system in order to get Plasma work correctly again. I now tried reproducing that issue using Wayland, though so far it didn’t happen there.
Since i don’t know how to reproduce this more frequently i want to mention that i use xpadneo. Which needed an upgrade to work with 6.12. And it also didn’t happen without using a gamepad, which of course could be a coincidence. I’d appreciate any help on that since i want to track down what’s causing that since i never had any issues before with this system.
My Specs are:
OS: EndeavourOS x86_64
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D (16) @ 4.15 GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT [Discrete]
DE: KDE Plasma 6.2.3
WM: X11
And for what it’s worth…if using Wayland does stop the issue from popping up, do you have any blockers to using a Wayland session in general? (I would imagine more and more future development will start to clash with the generally static X11 over time)
Well it is hard to say i didn’t play any retroarch game for 2 Months. But back then it worked fine but that was using different Mesa drivers and a different kernel as well. Since it is happening so randomly without any message in the logs it’s hard to reproduce or knowing what might causing it. So far that Retroarch Emulator seems to be the only thing giving me issues (yet). I now switched to wayland. And have not yet seen the issue. Though i guess i have to see how that goes. I know there has been lots of updates to amdgpu lately and suspect that that might have introduced some Issue. Though the issue you linked me is for the igpus. I use a discrete GPU.
I have also experienced very similar issues with the latest Arch kernel - 6.12.x similar to oidalo. No problems when I running older kernel like the 6.6. LTS.
In my case it happened when I used for example jellyfin media player, but also experienced it after running some other GPU accelerated stuff… Hardware is pretty similar to the original poster also and it also happens on Wayland.
Hi! Since it seems to be directly tied to which kernel version is in use, and to using GPU-accelerated programs (which would use the AMD open-source drivers), I doubt there is too much that KDE developers can do here since that software is upstream of things like Plasma.
Let’s be honest here, the Linux kernel development model in general sucks, it moves too fast; there is a new “stable” (yeah right) kernel every month, so it is not well-tested, and the previous ones go EOL immedietaly. The jump from 6.6 LTS to 6.12 LTS can be a shock, especially when 6.12 is very new and can for example “inherit” all the issues from 6.7 to 6.11. Apart from that it could be also related to the way Arch (or EndeavourOS -don’t know if they build their own kernels-) configures the kernel, for example it would be interesting to know if those problems come up with distros being on the same kernel like Fedora or OpenMandriva ROME, but unless you are dual/triple-booting, their live-CD won’t tell much.
For both cases, I see 6.13 is in core-testing in Arch, you could comment it out in /etc/pacman.conf and try this kernel out. Problem ofc is that if this works for you you would need to follow the stable branch of the kernel-line and hoping that a fix (related to amdgpu- or to kwin) will be backported at some point.
With journalctl -p7 are you sure you are seeing the latest entries? If you rebooted after the hang maybe it would be more wise to run journalctl -b -1 -p3 and look maybe for kwin_x11 / (cc @partizankwin_wayland) related issues.