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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
(www.phoronix.com)
Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA's default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author's intent.
Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being. They ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6+ thwarts their kernel driver.
What were some of the positives and negatives? Me personally, I have an RDNA2 card and got bitten by the gamma being too dark on hardware cursors (now resolved) and memory clock stuck at 1 GHz with some refresh rates (workaround is not to use refresh above ~144 Hz).
I had an rx480 that worked fantasic until a firmware update made it start freezing my pc in games after suspend, solution was to rollback that package to an older one or never use suspend. I currently have a 6650xt and that just crashes whenever it wants to sometimes, works fine for a few months then decides to freeze my whole pc, playing bg3 atm it froze on me like 3 times already
I dont have the error message atm unfortunately cause to have more disk space i set my system to delete the logs quite often (ill probably revert this now as ive got way more space), but the one part i do have is this "GCVM_L2_PROTECTION_FAULT_STATUS" , thats 95% of the times the error that shows up whenever my pc freezes
I looked it up and theres a bunch of mesa bugtracker issues listing the same error but honestly gpu driver stuff is so complex who knows whats really going on. baldurs gate 3 has crashed my whole system 3 times in 20-30 hours played, but except for that this past month ive also started getting blackscreens waking up from suspend sometimes on the non LTS kernel, luckily LTS fixes that for now, but not baldurs gate. The past year i've had this gpu theres been like 5 times where an update made the amd drivers unstable and ive had to change back to the LTS kernel to resolve it, maybe thats cause im using arch and stuff is more bleeding edge, but i havent had this many issues on my rx 480