[SOLVED] X server freezing after 30sec~ while using eGPU with RTX 3060 Pop OS 22.04

Hey everyone, I’m running a Framework 12th gen with a Razer Core X Chroma and RTX 3060 that I received from a friend. I run a dual boot system with Windows 11 and Pop OS 22.04.

The Windows partition was kind of a pain to setup but with a new Thunderbolt cable, everything went smooth. I got the Razer software installed, the 3060 recognized, and latest drivers installed and I haven’t experienced any issues with it. My Pop OS partition has been a whole other story.

My eGPU enclosure was recognized in the Thunderbolt accessories menu but it took a lot of reinstalling different types of drivers to actually find the right ones that would work with my card. I tried installing via apt many times to no avail. What actually worked and was going to software and updates, additional drivers, and with the eGPU plugged in, it would display the driver packages I could access. The only version that would install successfully is the nvidia-driver-530-open meta package. After this, my computer would no longer boot when I had the eGPU plugged in.

After a little more looking I found a suggestion for Ubuntu to add the kernel parameter ‘nvidia.NVreg_OpenRmEnableUnsupportedGpus=1’ to kernelstub which would allow my computer to boot up but only with Wayland and very laggy. I also took the time to install egpu-switcher while in Wayland. When I run nvidia-smi, I do see my graphics card present but nothing is running on it except the gnome shell.

When I try to boot into Cosmic with X11 I see that applications are running on the GPU via nvidia-smi and it’s perfect. However there is a problem where I will be using it for about 30 seconds - 1 minute and all of a sudden, it freezes. The only solution is to hard reset the device. I also added in the parameter ‘nvidia_drm.modeset=1’ as I had seen it recommended by another user in this forum but haven’t found that it made a difference.

I was able to grab a log from the nvidia reporter and came across this error when X11 was booting. Something to do with mistiming? There was another part of the log that mentioned something about right click advertising with my touch pad. There weren’t any other errors in the file besides these. I can provide the whole log if it would help in diagnosing the problem but I’m at a loss at this point. I have everything else setup great so if I can just have it not crash, it would be perfect or if someone could direct me into how to best setup Wayland with NVIDIA drivers.

Hi, is your BIOS 3.05 or 3.06?
Do you see “GPU has fallen off the bus” in dmesg?

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Hi! It appears I am running on BIOS 3.05. After checking that 3.06 delivered Thunderbolt compliance, that is most likely the problem. I did check dmesg but didn’t see “GPU has fallen off the bus”. However, I did see xHCI host controller not responding and couldn’t allocate usb_device and has similar output to what was found in this post. I will update that and let you know the situation from there

UPDATE: It worked! I went into my Windows partition and installed the new 3.06 update and am now able to run X without any weird freezing or crashing provided that I do the trick of plugging in my eGPU at the bootloader menu. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction! Wayland is also running a lot better too!

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Hi @T8R , thanks for updating this thread that updating BIOS 3.06 resolved the issue. marking this as solved.