Windows has fully user space graphics drivers since Vista. Linux still utilizes kernel modules and I'm not aware of plans to move everything to user space. It's honestly pretty cool that entire graphics driver can crash under Windows and all that happens is a bit of flickering.
Are you sure? It seems like WDDM has a user-mode "User-mode display driver" - which looks to me like the HW-specific part of Mesa: it's invoked by the D3D runtime - and a "Display miniport driver", which is in the kernel.
That said, no doubt Linux's ability to reset drivers is way, way behind... We're coming up on 20 years since Windows could recover from a graphics driver reset reliably without losing the desktop, and only partial hacks exist on Linux today.
I really need to get around to building a sample HTML page to show how unsafe having WebGL enabled on Linux browsers is. One long shader, and your desktop is a goner.
Are you sure?
I'm not a Windows system architect but I see the Radeon driver on my iGPU under Windows crash all the time in reproducible scenarios.
The only time the system can recover is when the display compositor crashes (Wayland)
This is a huge advantage of Windows...
It doesn't matter much what Linux you use. Rather what is your desktop environment? (KDE Plasma, Gnome, sway etc.)
On KDE for example there is a shortcut to restart the compositor, which might fix your issue.
But in general you might have luck "restarting" it by switching the tty. You do that by pressing CTRL + ALT + some function key between F1 and F8 (the standard gui tty number depends on the distro). Try to switch to a non gui tty and then back.
For example, on my distro I would do:
but on yours it might be F7 or some other.
+1 to ctrl-alt-fsomething (start at f1 and go up to move through the different virtual terminals). once in a while there are graphics problems which this will fix.
If you're using GNOME Shell on X you can reload the shell (and all of its extensions) with alt-f2 and then in the "Run a command" dialog that appears type r and hit enter. Unfortunately this doesn't work in GNOME on Wayland.
Thanks Zorin OS uses GNOME with Wayland
I agree with Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2 but would add
init 3 init 5
but I learned for my case its better to reboot if my GPU is acting up the instability would eventually come back
the init command probably only works in Debian nowadays givin it's a thing from the sysvinit era
While these can help on other issues, these will do nothing if the driver has an unrecoverable issue.
If the kernel runs into a oops it can recover and you won't notice anything except a nasty looking error in dmesg. If it runs into a panic you need to hard reboot the system as it can't continue to run.
And the driver is stuffed if the hardware decides to have an unrecoverable issue.
(I'm looking at you, Intel GuC. You dumb little bastard.)
amdgpu has a recovery mechanism built in that can be triggered using sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/N/amdgpu_gpu_recover where N is the number of the DRI device in question. You could bind a shortcut to doing that I presume.
Is that function a niche thing? I've never needed it and don't know anybody who has... What are some situations where it might need to be used?
I have a case. My PC at work is a HP Celeron PC. For some reason the Intel HD drivers go nuts in Office and the whole ribbon just turns black. That spreads to all other applications and makes every signel menu bar just a black rectangle. The only solution to this is to restart the driver. No driver or windows update could fix it.
If no drivers or windows update could fix it, are you sure it's not a hardware issue? What you describe sounds similar to bad VRAM symptoms.
Happens only in Office. No other program has ever triggered it. So it's either Intel or HP or Windows, but since it is the lowest offering of hardware and software, probably a combination of all 3.
I think the question is, is it needed in your favourite Linux distro?
I guess not, since you would need GPU drivers in the first place /s
exactly my thought
Maybe sudo systemctl restart gdm? That's not quite the same as it restarts gnome display manager.
When your computer freezes and you can't get to a tty with Ctrl+alt+F4 then it likely encountered a kernel panic. A panic is not recoverable. In some senerios I've seen the amdgpu module run into a kernel oops which is recoverable. It doesn't really effect the desktop other than a studder as the kernel reinitializes in the background.
If your system is freezing start by checking RAM and then try a different GPU. Its likely a hardware issue
There used to exist a hotkey CTRL-ALT-BKSP for restarting your current X-Session, don't know if this still exists
That's specific to X11. It also wasn't always enabled for security reasons (breaking out of a locked screen). Now with Wayland there's no standard.
How is it a security risk to break out of a lock screen only to end up at a login screen?
It's turned off by default in a lot of distros these days but it can be turned back on. It used to be that editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf was recommended but because file inclusions are a thing these days, it makes more sense to create a new file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/enable-killing-xserver.conf:
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "false"
EndSection
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Keyboard Defaults"
MatchIsKeyboard "yes"
Option "XkbOptions" "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection
Then restart the X server (which, these days, is pretty much a reboot). Or, going through the x.org documentation archives, it looks like you could dispense with the config files and run setxkbmap -option "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp" in a terminal session and that'll do the same thing.
Additionally, it terminated all gui processes. Which the windows shortcut mentioned in the question doesn't.
There is a proposal to consider making a Wayland extension where programs can sit around and re-attach to a fresh, non-deaded display server. KDE is much closer to having a working version.
That doesn't restart anything. That kills the X11 server.
It may or may not restart depending on system settings.
That doesn't work for Wayland and I'm unsure which one Zorin uses
It uses Wayland
That is not an equivalent.
On Linux, if a graphical app does not crash from this, that is a rare exception.
On windows, if a graphical app crashes from that, that is an exception.
Ctrl+alt+backspace
I think on some distros this is disabled by default. I have forgotten how you can re-enable it.
Please explain why you need that in the post.
Average linux help post, someone comes along saying "why do you need that" instead of being helpful lol
Most of the time it is to avoid xyproblem.info
And you know if I had actually given an answer he would have just told me why his way of doing things is better.
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