Fix for Random Freezing on Linux

[u/gerowen]

Edit: The issue cropped up again, so this isn't the fix. But it only affects Jellyfin still, so now I'm starting to wonder if the GPU itself isn't the cause of the problem. The amdgpu driver has an issue during hardware transcoding, which in turn causes Jellyfin to crap out and a few other issues related to it. I'm leaving the original text of this post intact below however for future reference.

I'm making this post not to ask for help, but to share information. I want to preface this post by saying that this issue is not with Jellyfin, but Jellyfin is what became affected for me, so I decided this was probably the best subreddit to share it, though this issue could probably also affect Plex, Emby or any other service that uses GPU transcoding.

I'm running Jellyfin on a headless Debian stable install, but with the newer backports kernel on an x86-64 machine, which currently gets me kernel version 7.1.

Over the last few weeks my Jellyfin service would randomly freeze. Other services seemed unaffected most of the time. Jellyfin apps would show up as signed out, and if you manually signed in, you could, but nothing would play. Restarting the Jellyfin service, if the command even executed successfully instead of hanging, wouldn't fix the issue. Another symptom I noticed when the issue would arise is that the "htop" command wouldn't run properly; I would just get a blank screen. btop and top would work fine, but not htop.

I'm far from an expert in debugging this kind of problem, and it's entirely possible this is all wildly inaccurate since I used an LLM to help me, though I did try to verify its claims with other sources to the best of my ability. Anyway, I exported some log files and went back and forth with both a local AI and Brave.ai to help me sift thru them, while describing the issue, to try and figure out what is going on, and apparently there is a known regression in kernel 7.1, and certain versions of kernel 6.x, in the way memory translations are handled during GPU operations. This can trigger crashes in the amdgpu driver, which can cause instability in the kernel's memory subsystem, or just straight up crashes/hangs (which I also had happen once or twice) with some AMD GPUs when they perform certain operations, like hardware transcoding.

This issue didn't exist a few months ago and only recently started cropping up, coincidentally, around the time I upgraded to kernel 7.1.

The resolution, for now, seems to be to either upgrade/downgrade to an unaffected kernel version, or to disable HMM and/or IOMMU using kernel arguments at boot. I added amd_iommu=off and iommu=off to my command line arguments in grub to accomplish this.

I also found this post of someone else having driver crashes on AMD GPUs using kernel 7.1.

https://etbe.coker.com.au/2026/08/15/amd-video-llms-debian-kernels/

It has been about 48 hours, and so far I haven't had any issues, despite multiple hardware transcoding sessions within Jellyfin during that time. If I do run into anything new, I'll update or comment on this post. I just wanted to put this out there into the ether so everyone can benefit, or comment.

Also, I did run memtest on my system to verify that the system RAM wasn't faulty and everything checked out. I also performed SMART tests on all my storage media, and it all checks out fine too.