Proton breaks after an amount of uptime

[jellymouse]

Seems to affect all versions of proton. After an amount of time running, Proton will freeze, crash anything running in it, and refuse to launch any subsequent applications with the symptom of the game listing it's self as playing while locked up in the background. Steam will continue to list the game as playing until it's force-quit. No window, and steam can't kill the app it's self; been killing it via htop. Manjaro linux, 5.6.10_rt5-1, using KDE Plasma Other instances of Wine aren't affected by this at all. Restarting steam doesn't help. Switching sessions doesn't help. Sleep/Resume doesn't help. Only a full restart fixes the issue, and it will inevitably come back.

How long it takes seems random.

[kisak-valve]

Hello @jellymouse, please copy your system information from Steam (Steam -> Help -> System Information) and put it in a gist, then include a link to the gist in this issue report.

This sounds like some kind of system issue. Are there any hints in dmesg after entering the quirk state?

[jellymouse]

https://gist.github.com/jellymouse/2e8aa4271d09567cb4bb7983f1213852

I'll see if I can catch anything in dmesg next time I witness a crash. Also, I've now had it happen without having launched any application through steam yet, just having steam open in the background while logged in.

[murlakatamenka]

@jellymouse I've had very similar (random but severe freezes that can crash Steam / whole user session / even whole system) issue for months now. System is similar to yours: Arch, KDE (+/- i3 as window manager) and Nvidia GPU (GTX 770). Affected games - Rocket League and Lonely Mountains Downhill.

I might have found the source of the issue in my case. Do you by any chance follow this - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#Avoid_screen_tearing. It seems passing every window to a composition pipeline causes those f**king random freezes.

Can you try playing any relevant games with similar settings where composition pipeline is disabled?

or via shell:

# on / off
nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode="nvidia-auto-select +0+0 { ForceCompositionPipeline = Off }"

I really-really hope it helps. Will check more myself in the meantime.

[bradallred]

I've been having this issue for the last several weeks too. Also on Manjaro KDE + Nvidia. Unfortunately Proton, Manjaro, and Nvidia all updated around the same time so I can't nail down a culprit. I've tried disabling the Nvidia composition pipline as suggested above and it doesn't have any noticeable affect in reducing the occurrence of this.

[murlakatamenka]

Completing my previous message.

I also happen to use pure i3 (i.e. without Plasma at all and without a compositor like picom) and those freezes happened to me anyway. The ones that could kill the whole desktop session. So it shouldn't be relevant to Plasma in general or KWin in particular (it had problems with NVidia before).

The biggest change for me was to remove triple buffering from xorg.conf. After all GTX 770 has only 2 GB VRAM so this tweak eases GPU's work. The freezes still happen sometimes in Lonely Mountains: Downhill but at least they aren't so dire and I can kill the process and go on. Lowering some in-game settings makes freezes rather rare and I can deal with that. They still do occur, so it's not a case closed.

[murlakatamenka]

Proton 5.0.8 fixes KDE specific bug with Alt-Tabbing, see here. Probably it'll get better for you @jellymouse @bradallred

[jellymouse]

This still happens. Seems even more frequent than ever. Using XFCE4 now, and it still happens too often.

[jellymouse]

So, I had a game open after about a half hour hang, and it seems it might be related to having mount points that aren't mounted/aren't accessible, such as networked drives. There are similar issues with Thunar file manager.

[murlakatamenka]

@jellymouse that might be actually relevant! I have one HDD that is auto-mounted by systemd via fstab entry, it's not always plugged in.