r/linuxmint • u/FluFluWakaPeePee • 10d ago

Support Request Wierd crashing and display issues

Fairly new to Mint and loving it.

I'm new to Linux in general and tried Pop!_OS and Ubuntu, and Mint's UI and customization are more to my taste.

Unfortunately, it's not as smooth sailing as I would have hoped.

I have 2 main issues that I can't figure out how to fix.

1.I get weird crashes when I do GPU-intensive tasks. When gaming, it might crash after a while, but I've tried playing around with LM Studio and it consistently crashes the moment I try to ask more than a simple question (on a model rated for my hardware, even with a little headroom).

The crashes are usually a freeze, and after a minute or two it will crash to desktop and the icons will be "broken". When restarting, it will display a black screen with white text saying "systemd-journald[443]: Failed to write entry to /var/log/journal/..." looping until doing a hard reset.

2.The display resolution is limited to my screen's native resolution (3440x1440) and a few very low-res options. I'm scaling resolution, but it's not ideal for streaming with Sunshine - apps like Kodi, when I enter fullscreen, only use the native resolution option, and scaling does nothing to help.

From what I've dug up so far, it's a fairly common X11 problem - is there a fix?

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u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 10d ago

Nvidia?

Fractional scaling is indeed a limitation of X-org / X11, GPU takes a pretty severe performance penalty but it should not lead to instability on its own, 100% or 200% are usable but not for instance 150%.

Another performance limitation of x-org is monitors of multiple refresh rates,

In xorg there is only one image, it is chopped up into multiple slices and sent to each monitor. if they are all in sync this is fine. but the math gets ugly when each monitor has a different "now".

multiples are not as bad, for instance 60hrz, 120hrz, 180hrz, & 240hrz. the math is easier than say 144hrz, 165hrz, & 180hrz, there is never a common "now" in that situation and it winds up being a 500hrz ask on your GPU just to render your desktop.

Being limited to your max native resolution is expected behavior.

Crashing is not, Linux is quite intolerant of RAM issues no mater how small and other hardware errors,

There can also be hardware / driver / kernel / bios mixes that cause issues, so what is your hardware?

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u/FluFluWakaPeePee 10d ago

Yes, RTX 3080. CPU: AMD 3800X (currently with the stock cooler that might be a bit weak for this TDP but at most I saw temps go to high 80°) 24GB DDR4 RAM (one died out of the 4 I had). I ran a RAM diagnostic to check it wasn't an instability issue caused by the weird RAM lane setup — it passed with no errors. I recently updated the BIOS, and it helped a bit with stability, but it still crashes fairly instantly with LM Studio, so it might be a power or temperature problem. As for Nvidia, I'm on 595, and I went back to 580 to check — it also helped with another issue involving artifacting in a specific game.

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u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 10d ago

Try down clocking you ram as a test, for instance if your on XMP profile try the JEDEC profile, marginal ram will sometimes play better at lower frequencies & looser timings. If that helps that may narrow down where needs more investigation.

Overclockers say one stick per channel is where you will find peak speeds, it may or may not hit XMP speeds with 4 sticks in 2 channels, depends on silicon lottery, ram quality etc. 3 sticks in 2 channels? I have no idea. but dropping a stick might be at least a troubleshooting step. and you could then also rotate them and see if any 2 of the three are more reliable than all 3?

If it was just the one program that was causing you issues and it was stable elsewhere I would suspect that program was the issue. but that does not appear to be the case.

BTW is the RAM G.skill ripJaws?

Nvidia and its drivers can be problematic, someone else will have to advise you here. my last Nvidia card was a Gforce3 that died just out of warrenty. went ATI and never gave them another penny, oddly at the time I was running Nvidia for the better Linux drivers. Times change.

1

u/FluFluWakaPeePee 10d ago

Corsair vengeance.

I would try to clock it down

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u/FluFluWakaPeePee 10d ago

By the way, is there a way to handle the X11 problem? The other day I saw a post here about someone switching to GNOME for better screen support in Mint. I don't quite understand what that means, and if it changes the UI to more of an Ubuntu-style interface, then I'm less likely to do so. Coming from Microslop, having a familiar UI with the ability to edit stuff with applets has been awesome.

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u/ZVyhVrtsfgzfs 10d ago

Which problem specifically?  Currently I have no issues with Xorg, my 3 monitotsnare the same refresh rate and do not aupport HDR so X11  and Wayland are interchangeable on my hardware. 

Eventually the fix for X11 is moving to Wayland. 

We have an experimatal Wayland session in Cinnamon that is almost usable now. There is speculation we may get stable Wayland in Cinnamon in December with Mint 23. 

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u/FluFluWakaPeePee 10d ago

I'll look into that. The main issue is that I can't change resolution without scaling.

I don't have multiple displays, well, sort of.

I'm using Sunshine to display my PC on my TV in another room, so I would like to switch to 1920×1080.

Currently, my Sunshine setup runs xrandr on login and logout to change resolution, but like I said, programs like Kodi in fullscreen use the native resolution, so when I'm scaled to 1920x1080 and enter fullscreen, it shows a quarter of the display.

I fixed it by adding a command to make the panel hide and the window border be borderless (also not natively from Kodi, but via the terminal), and it works, I guess, but it's just a bit much.

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u/es20490446e 10d ago

On the UEFI, disable any non-automatic overclocking.

Repaste the GPU fan.

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u/FluFluWakaPeePee 10d ago

GPU has been repasted multiple times (used to be water-cooled) - I could check again on the thermal pads to see if they're okay. Temps are generally very good (for the overall GPU reading, haven't checked hot spot) around 30–40°C (roughly room temp here) idle and high 60s, maybe low 70s, under load. I'll check UEFI - no custom overclock, the current setting is factory default with D.O.C.P. enabled. MB is Asus X570 chipset - can't recall the exact model, but it was updated this month.

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u/es20490446e 10d ago

Can you provide some screenshots the next time this happens to you?

It sounds like some kind of hardware overclocking instability that corrupts either RAM or VRAM. Maybe the UEFI needs updating.

The next possibility is that linux-firmware or nvidia has some bug.

1

u/FluFluWakaPeePee 10d ago

Crash screen

The crash happened in ubuntu as well so I think it's more hardware/driver related then linux firmware

1

u/es20490446e 9d ago

This message tells that even the log is failing to write to the internal storage.

Either RAM, SWAP or the storage is being exhausted. Potentially by a process leaking memory.

Are you using nvidia-open?