Annoying AMD Linux Graphics Driver Crashes With "Timed Out Fences" Has A Fix Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Annoying AMD Linux Graphics Driver Crashes With "Timed Out Fences" Has A Fix Coming

Since the Linux 5.19 kernel there have been many reports on Twitter, Reddit, or forums, and elsewhere over open-source AMD Radeon driver users experiencing crashes that often then appear in the kernel log around fences timing out. A fix for this show-stopping bug for AMD gamers looks like it will be coming to the Linux 6.2 kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-Fix-For-5.19-Bug

[kiffmet]

Don't forget this patch: It's related to the issue and critical in avoiding a rare race condition that ultimately leads to no-retry page faults, fence timeout and hance GPU reset. The other two patches just make the problem less likely, only having all three of them constitutes a complete fix.

[ms178]

Just to tamper expecations, I still see random crashes with all of the mentioned patches applied to my 6.0.7 Kernel. I finally got around to provide a stack trace, Christian told me it was a known issue and being worked on. Hopefully with some results rather soon as I see this at least two times daily while gaming and that horrible gaming experience goes on for months now. As there are no such issues on Windows, the GPU is definetly fine.

[ridge]

Hurray! Wonder if this will fix my crashing issue in Metro Exodus...

[Spacefish]

There are multiple reasons for "Ring gfx timeout", can be a GPU hang as well or other reasons.. This just fixes one of them.
In my experience with my NAVI10 card amd fixed a lot of these hangs over the kernel versions and currently i haven´t had a gfx timeout in months, where i had them within minutes before, when running any 3D workload.
IMHO amdgpu is one of the best, if not the best supported GFX driver in linux.
Maybe this even opens the door for more RDNA based designs in the future, as really good support is already present in linux!

[HD7950]

I have a Polaris card and it's been a long time, maybe years, since I've had an unexpected crash, they are really stable under emulators or Proton. The problem is i want to buy a RDNA 2 card but they don't seem really stable at this moment. Should i wait more time?

[_r00t-]

Since i bought my Radeon 5600XT, i had several ring gfx time out lock ups. It was ok with some extra kernel parameters but since kernel 5.19 this issue appeared again(well not very often as previously). As for now, I'm very happy for this fix. Thanks to all AMDGPU devs!

[Mershl]

Just to tamper expecations, I still see random crashes with all of the mentioned patches applied to my 6.0.7 Kernel. I finally got around to provide a stack trace, Christian told me it was a known issue and being worked on. Hopefully with some results rather soon as I see this at least two times daily while gaming and that horrible gaming experience goes on for months now. As there are no such issues on Windows, the GPU is definetly fine.

Hi ms178,

I've also reported to the issue. I'm able to reproduce the issue by the hour. If you're seriously having a bad experience outside of testing consider using the LTS (can not confirm myself) or 5.18 kernel. I've been running 5.18 for 4 weeks now without a single timeout.

[V1tol]

Had maybe 1 or 2 crashes on my desktop RX6800XT since I bought it half a year ago, mostly caused by trying to build Mesa with LTO and similar experiments. No crashes observed in usual gaming, just finished like 4 hour session in PlanetSide 2. Using 6.0.7 without problems now.

[M@GOid]

I have a Polaris card and it's been a long time, maybe years, since I've had an unexpected crash, they are really stable under emulators or Proton. The problem is i want to buy a RDNA 2 card but they don't seem really stable at this moment. Should i wait more time?

I have a RX6600 for a couple months now, running it with Ubuntu 20.04 (5.15 LTS kernel) and Kisak PPA for the latest stable Mesa drivers. Things seems fine, the only problem is with AV1 decoding on Firefox producing color artifacts. Just disabling AV1 support in Firefox made the problem go away.

I believe RDNA2 will achieve the same level of polish Polaris have, because it will be around for a long time on the low end GPUs, the Steam Deck, and be the iGPU for AMD APUs for a few years just as Vega was.