This forum has been archived. All content is frozen. Please use KDE Discuss instead.

KDE neon 5.17 : erratic radeon and amdgpu kernel drivers

Tags: None
(comma "," separated)
benuranouk
Registered Member
Posts
2
Karma
0
Hello people,
I am completely new to Neon but I used Kubuntu and Chakra a lot before. I had no problem installing it and it runs perfectly except some weird graphic crashes that I never experienced before. (I have a Hawaii AMD r9 290) After some time after boot-up, it can be 5 minutes or 30 minutes, the desktop freezes, sometimes there is weird geometric color shapes appearing, I hear the gpu fans stopping, generally there is a black screen and then the desktop comes back with a working mouse but nothing reacts to any input anymore. Sometimes I got thrown to the login screen, I type my password and discover the same non-working desktop. Only escape is the power button :'(

So I tried
Code: Select all
lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3d|Display'
and realized it was using radeon and not amdgpu. So I told the grub to always use amdgpu, updated it and rebooted.

on the next reboot, I noticed a better performance, faster boot up, quieter fans (which was suspicious :| ) . Still waiting to experience a weird shape color freeze crash but haven't yet. Instead, when I run a game (Kerbal Space Program for example), the fans decides to fire at 100% for 1 second every 5 seconds which is extremely loud and regular sound and can drive crazy any one in the room.

Any body had this kind of problem before ? Ideas how and what to do ?
Thanks
benuranouk
Registered Member
Posts
2
Karma
0
Okay I found the problem : the kernel 5.x is really **** at managing my GPU.
While radeon module (on 5.x) completely fails, amdgpu works but forget how to use fans and let the gpu go up to 90C until some sort of hard fail safe on the graphic card activate a 100% fan to urgently cool down.
So for now the only thing I had to do was using kernel 4.15. The first noticeable change when I booted on 4.15 was that it suddenly realized the GPU was hot (it was around 75-80C idle) and fired the fans at 80% or so for a few minutes and let them run for 40% for a long time. I'll check what happens on games and on the long time range but it seems clear that the kernel was the problem.
Things that helped me :
- https://itsfoss.com/check-laptop-cpu-temperature-ubuntu/
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkk2zclkH7k <-- To override GPU fan control
-Booting on Windows also helped me to see how the driver normally behave and that it was not a hardware problem


Bookmarks



Who is online

Registered users: bancha, Bing [Bot], daret, Evergrowing, Google [Bot], lockheed, sandyvee, Sogou [Bot]