X11 crash with AMDGPU, possibly OpenGL

[Sebastian_Miller]

I am using Debian 12,
xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu 23.0.0-1
firmware-amd-graphics 20230210-5
xserver-xorg 1:7.7+23
firmware-linux-free 20200122-1
firmware-misc-nonfree 20230210-5
CPU model name : AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics
Kernel 6.11.5+bpo-amd64

Which BIOS version are you using? – I do not know

and experience random crashes in the display. Either X11 terminates and puts me back onto the login manager, or X11 terminates and colorful blocks of pixel soup appear on the screen. Keyboard input will not be processed on pixel-soup, so I cannot fall back onto getty, I need to reboot.
It can happen with the internal and external monitors, with and without a dock. It happens once a month on office workflows and every few hours on OpenGL workflows. Software like a FDM-printer-slicer or a game or hardware video decoding (mpv --hwdec) can trigger this bug every few hours.

I tried to disable tearing features

Section “OutputCLass”
Identifier “AMD”
MatchDriver “amdgpu”
Driver “amdgpu”
Option “TearFree” “off”
Option “VariableRefresh” “false”
Option “DRI” “3”
EndSection

without any change to the crash frequency.
I would like to stop the X11 crashes, I may sacrifice hardware acceleration and battery efficiency.

[s116]

Having same error, also on Debian 12 with same CPU.
Kernel: 6.1.0-30-amd64

[Martin_Pavelek]

Hi; I just randomly found this thread while looking for similar issues (crashing / freezing) on my system. My problems are on Debian 13 and I don’t have a solution yet (I’m putting together a post to ask about it tomorrow), but in your case the problem is very likely in version of the firmware-amd-graphics package – the version available in Debian 12 has known issues and needs to be updated to at least one from the end of February 2024.

Last year I wrote more details about it at InstallingDebianOn/FrameWork/Laptop13/AMD_7040_Series - Debian Wiki, but I did not update it since then; you should probably disregard the instructions for manual firmware update, and instead install firmware-amd-graphics package from stable-backports (currently offering version 20240709).

I would not recommend updating to Debian 13 (trixie) at this moment, because I did so a month ago and the random infrequent crashes I was having before became much more frequent. So there is likely some issue with new kernel or drivers.

[Sebastian_Miller]

I want to confirm that firmware-amd-graphics 20240709-2~bpo12+1 looks very promising, I haven’t had any graphics related crashes since updating a month ago.
It is only available in Debian-backports.

[Sebastian_Miller]

I am very happy with firmware-amd-graphics 20240709-2~bpo12+1 and would like to report my issue as solved