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Bug#848599: X server still freezes at random while playing certain 3D games



Package: mesa
Version: 13.0.2-3

X crashes after a random period of time of playing graphically intensive 3D games, such as Team Fortress 2 or Torchlight II. In both cases, the lockup is absolute (keyboard only reacts to REISUB). The difference relies on the fact that TF2 experiences an audio crash whereas Torchlight II does not, although that's probably something about their game engines.

How to reproduce:
- Download TF2
- Play for between 30 minutes and 1 hour in a big, open map (bots practice is a good way to play one of these maps)
- Watch it crash
Alternatively:
- Play Torchlight II
- Go into a dungeon (seems dungeons with lots of particle effects are the best) and play there for a while
- Time to crash varies, but it seems you can get it to crash in less than 15 minutes if you are using a WM without a compositor, whereas you may have to play for 30-45 minutes to get a crash if using Compton, for example
- Wait for the crash
I am fairly sure other 3D games are affected as well. Upstream bug reports mention XCOM: Enemy Unknown, amongst others. Graphical quality may or may not have something to do with the time to crash, so I would recommend setting them as high as possible.

While the Debian changelog for 13.0.2-2 reports that cherrypicked commit 6dc96de solves the issue, the crashes still appear, albeit it may be possible stability has increased compared to previous versions since Torchlight II takes slightly longer to crash. However, I have noticed a huge change: both Awesomenauts and Skullgirls (2D games), which previously segfaulted on start and crashed two minutes in when launched without a compositor (Compton) running, respectively, now run stable without a compositor. Awesomenauts' change might have had something to do with a recent update, although the devs stated it was a problem they couldn't fix since it was a problem with the open source drivers, but Skullgirls hasn't been updated in a while so the change certainly had something to do with it. A curious detail is that some games were more stable when not running Compton, like Starbound, which ran flawlessly for hours without a compositor (I'm using i3), but it crashed after about one hour when run with Compton. I haven't been able to test again what happens after the patch.

According to the following bug report, people using the in-development versions of mesa (13.1) and llvm (4.0) are free of this bug, but someone using a patched version of mesa (I assume using the same patch as this one) is still experiencing the bug.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93649

I'm sorry for not being able to provide any logs, since they don't report anything meaningful (or anything at all, for that matter) at the time of the crash, as is common for this bug. If you want some extra information, I will be glad to provide it.

Extra info:
- Using Asus R9 380X, 2GB model
- Running up to date Sid
- CPU is AMD FX8350
- mesa 13.0.2-3 (amd64 version, i386 libraries installed as well)
- llvm 1:3.9.1-1, llvm-dev and llvm 1:4.0~svn286225-1 installed
- running linux 4.8.11-1
- firmware-amd-graphics 20161130-2
- Running i3 4.13-1 + compton 0.1~beta2+20150922-1

Thanks for you attention.


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