[SOLVED] Steam causing kernel panic / system freeze
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Hi has anyone had issues with steam since the Jan 3rd updates in -current?
I'm using alienbobs steamclient package. I launched steam after updating the recent packages and reinstalling the nvidia driver... The entire computer just hangs, having to literally pull the plug.
After booting back up, the scripts in ~/.local/share/Steam are all 0 in size. I decided to delete the entire local steam folder and start clean, running steam again.
The prompt for steam downloading an update is visible as normal, and the local folder is repopulated, but then once this finishes... The system completely locks up.
I believe this could be related to the new kernel package, but I'm not sure. I am getting no other issues besides steam completely crashing my computer.
Is anyone else getting this problem and what is the best way to find out what is actually happening here?
---- Edit 1: also steam worked fine just before I updated to the latest -current packages from Jan 3rd.
---- Edit 2: i've just tried looking through every log file in /var/log and cannot find anything about a panic, crash or even a segfault. Oddly, my keyboard doesn't have a sysrq key, but upon the freeze after steam is run, no input works at all, not even toggling the caps lock LED for example.
SOLVED. This problem is related to the recent CPU security patches involving Intel (despite me having an amd fx 8320 cpu...)
Add this to your kernel boot commands:
Code:
nopti
Steam now loads up as per usual and does not cause the system to hang/freeze. This command disables whatever those patches added for the farce involving Intel cpus as far as i know.
Might be worth applying that on Slackware if you have an AMD CPU for the time being, although the bootloader option for "nopti" seems to be adequate.
This fix will likely be included in the next point release of the 4.14 series kernel. The details of the patch state:
Code:
- Exclude AMD from the PTI enforcement. Not necessarily a fix, but if
AMD is so confident that they are not affected, then we should not
burden users with the overhead"
SOURCE: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux...utm_source=anz
AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel
page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture
does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that
access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode
when that access would result in a page fault.
Disable page table isolation by default on AMD processors by not setting
the X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE feature, which controls whether X86_FEATURE_PTI
is set.
Distribution: Slackware64 15.0 (started with 13.37). Testing -current in a spare partition.
Posts: 935
Rep:
Quote:
Originally Posted by coralfang
After booting back up, the scripts in ~/.local/share/Steam are all 0 in size.
It can be more dangerous. I launched Steam from the whiskermenu and the system froze.
After reboot, whiskermenu was with default configurations and the hierarchy in the Wine menu was lost,
so I think other files opened at the time of freeze could get corrupted too.
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