Hi.

After months of stability recently when I launch any steam game my desktop locks up, i.e I see the game options, for example in Talos principle I can see the game launcher, i.e - launch game - launch 64bit , etc but I cannot click on anything and desktop is unusable until I restart the display manager (sddm).

I also see in dmesg

Code: Select all

[  913.802390] NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-7cc98963-de61-2e6a-f695-47b083a0ce61
[  913.802393] NVRM: GPU Board Serial Number:
[  913.802395] NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 31, Ch 00000028, engmask 00000101, intr 10000000

This doesn't happen all the time, I get the feeling its when I have been running Firefox before.

Now recently my system - KDE neon, has had a few updates, i.e the HWE kernel from 4.10.x -> 4.13.x and intel-microcode package updates so this may be connected.

How can I provide more useful logs to troubleshoot this ?

I have tried launching steam via terminal however when the desktop locks up I cannot see the terminal output.

After kernel updates I reinstall the nvidia drivers, I have tried latest 384.x, 387.x and 390.x drivers, all have the same issue.

I had the same problem with one of my computers when it had KDE Neon with the microcode and proprietary NVIDIA driver (384 I think at the time with kernel 4.10). It is a GT 710 card and Intel G3258 processor. According to NVIDIA, the 31 xid error code is a driver or app error, so at least your hardware is still good.
http://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/xid-errors/index.html

I asked about this on reddit, and was told to update my bios.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions ... _not_arch/
It seemed to help stop crashes for several days by updating my bios, but I had already switched to Arch and wanted the partition for something else so I never found out for sure if that was the issue.

I have similar setups on two other computers and they never crash so maybe it is the BIOS. That computer with the problem is now on Arch with KDE and there are no problems anymore.

mackay wrote:I asked about this on reddit, and was told to update my bios.

Thank for the response ...

Pretty sure its not related to the bios, it was working fine (for over a year) before the HWE kernel upgraded from 4.10.x -> 4.13.x, could be related to the intel-microcode update I guess... Also there is no new update for my bios.

Instead of relaunching sddm, please try to only kill Steam, Plasmashell and KWin (in this order). You can also try to use gdb or strace on the software component, which after killing unfreezed the system again.

Do this via VT or if VT switches are also not possible on freeze, SSH into the affected system with a secondary PC/laptop/smartphone.