Owls @candlebrae@plural.cafe

Identity is a junkyard full of odds and ends that you cobble together into something that looks cohesive but is really made of three teacups, a t-shirt, and a pet raccoon that you managed to fit in there somehow.

Our cat was really cute today. :)

HECK YEAH, we finally mostly fixed a computer issue that's plagued us for months!

So, every now and then the entire screen would freeze and go black. The caps lock key light would not respond, the cursor froze and vanished, all ttys were inaccessible; basically it was unusable without a hard restart, forcing us to lose whatever we were working on that hadn't been saved yet. Annoying as hell, sometimes crushing if we hadn't saved something for a while.

This issue happened with no warning, almost weekly but without much of a predictable pattern beyond "Firefox seems to set this off more often than other things." The logs showed several screens of page faults attributed to Firefox or Xorg (and after switching to Sway, to xwayland-xorg), AMDGPU attempting and failing to reset, and AMDGPU timing out "waiting for fences" along with ring gfx timeouts. Tossing the error codes in a search engine was the only way we ever found anything about it, but nothing up to now has worked. This week, it started to happen daily. Today, it happened 3 times in the same day while we were in the process of tracking down another fix because there had to be something we hadn't tried yet.

We finally found a fix that worked. It's apparently a GPU power management issue with certain AMD GPUs. Turned off DPM in kernel parameters, and we know for certain it helped because we pushed the computer hard to try to make it happen again (intensive Firefox usage usually sets it off). It happened- but no black screen of doom. It just froze for 5 seconds, had visual weirdness on one window, and then was perfectly usable again. No restart needed! And we can troubleshoot the rest now that we know what the root cause is!

This has been a problem for ages and to have finally made progress is awesome.

Oh god, every time. "I'll just rest my eyes for a minute."

Four hours later:

Plural culture is your sysmate having a gender crisis in the background while you're sitting in front watching weird YouTube videos.

Decided to give moving over to Wayland a shot and switched from i3 to Sway. Working pretty well so far! One or two things don't work the same (as expected) but for the most part it's smooth sailing. Just had to configure things to match our color palette and screw with Wofi and Waybar's CSS for a bit, which was pretty fun.

Brightness keys still refuse to work though, no clue why. The keys themselves work just fine and are bound correctly, and the commands execute in terminal correctly. They just aren't working for some reason. Still better than weekly Xorg pagefaults as far as problems go since this is much easier to troubleshoot and doesn't track back to an unresolved kernel bug.