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Showing posts from November, 2025

fedora 43: bad mesa update oopsie

F43 picked up the two patches I created to fix a bunch of deadlocks on laptops reported in my previous blog posting. Turns out Vulkan layers have a subtle thing I missed, and I removed a line from the device select layer that would only matter if you have another layer, which happens under steam. The fedora update process caught this, but it still got published which was a mistake, need to probably give changes like this more karma thresholds. I've released a new update https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2025-2f4ba7cd17  that hopefully fixes this. I'll keep an eye on the karma. 

a tale of vulkan/nouveau/nvk/zink/mutter + deadlocks

 I had a bug appear in my email recently which led me down a rabbit hole, and I'm going to share it for future people wondering why we can't have nice things. Bug: 1. Get an intel/nvidia (newer than Turing) laptop. 2. Log in to GNOME on Fedora 42/43  3. Hotplug a HDMI port that is connected to the NVIDIA GPU. 4. Desktop stops working. My initial reproduction got me a hung mutter process with a nice backtrace which pointed at the Vulkan Mesa device selection layer, trying to talk to the wayland compositor to ask it what the default device is. The problem was the process was the wayland compositor, and how was this ever supposed to work. The Vulkan device selection was called because zink called EnumeratePhysicalDevices, and zink was being loaded because we recently switched to it as the OpenGL driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs. I looked into zink and the device select layer code, and low and behold someone has hacked around this badly already, and probably wrongly and I've no ide...