[Wayland/NVIDIA] System Freeze When Playing Video in Browser

Loffah · 2025-03-23 12:33:31

Summary

On a high-end system with NVIDIA GPU and KDE Wayland, watching video (YouTube, etc.) in any browser (Brave, Firefox) eventually causes a full system freeze lasting 5–10 seconds. This is reproducible, survives safe mode, and happens across different browsers. It does not affect MPV, which plays all media fine.
After a reboot, the problem is gone temporarily (sometimes for ~24 hours), then reappears.
I've done extensive debugging and believe this may be related to Wayland + NVIDIA + compositor buffer sync, but I’m looking for help confirming the exact layer and a proper fix or mitigation.

System Details

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Kernel: 6.7.9-arch1-1
Desktop: KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland)
GPU: NVIDIA 4080 Super
Drivers: nvidia 570.129.04-2
Compositor: kwin_wayland

Nvidia packages

local/egl-gbm 1.1.2-1
    The GBM EGL external platform library
local/egl-wayland 4:1.1.18-1
    EGLStream-based Wayland external platform
local/egl-x11 1.0.0-1
    NVIDIA XLib and XCB EGL Platform Library
local/lib32-nvidia-utils 570.124.04-1
    NVIDIA drivers utilities (32-bit)
local/libvdpau 1.5-3
    Nvidia VDPAU library
local/libxnvctrl 570.124.04-1
    NVIDIA NV-CONTROL X extension
local/nvidia-open 570.124.04-4
    NVIDIA open kernel modules
local/nvidia-settings 570.124.04-1
    Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
local/nvidia-utils 570.124.04-1
    NVIDIA drivers utilities

What I've Confirmed

Browsers freeze, even in safe mode (--safe-mode in Firefox, --disable-gpu in Brave)
MPV never freezes, even with 4K video (hardware decoding enabled)
Hardware acceleration is ON
Rebooting resolves the issue for a day or so
kwin_wayland restart by performing these actions does not temporarily fix the issue(like a reboot would):
```
kwin_wayland --replace &
killall -9 kwin_wayland && kwin_wayland &
```
System doesn’t crash — input freezes, screen freezes, then it resumes
Strace captured GPU process in a browser during a freeze

Diagnostic Outputs

strace on Brave GPU process (Flatpak Brave):

futex(..., FUTEX_WAIT_BITSET_PRIVATE|FUTEX_CLOCK_REALTIME, ...) = -1 ETIMEDOUT
ppoll([...]) = 0 (Timeout)
epoll_wait(...) = 0

GPU process stuck waiting on futex + ppoll — appears to be blocked on compositor or DRM sync.

Was gonna upload full strace logs here but I'm concerned about sensitive information being in there somehow (lol)

dmesg Relevant Lines:

[    6.093978] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[    6.234231] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX Open Kernel Module for x86_64  570.124.04
[57765.783923] ata7.00: supports DRM functions and may not be fully accessible

journalctl -b
https://pastebin.com/D25P3Gyz
No clear crash, but frequent Flatpak/DBus poll events, then silent gaps during freeze.

nvidia-smi Output During Issue
Seems normal to me:

| kwin_wayland | ~350MiB |
| plasmashell  | ~170MiB |
| brave        | ~300MiB (various subprocesses) |

Things I've Tried

Reinstalling browser/video-related packages
No effect
MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX, MOZ_WEBRENDER=0
No change
Firefox/Brave safe mode
Still freezes
kwin_wayland --replace
Does not resolve issue
reinstalled nvidia drivers
Does not resolve issue
Switched to MPV (no freeze)
Works perfectly
strace GPU process during freeze
Captured waiting state
Reboot
Temporarily resolves problem

Hypothesis

This is possibly from what I've gathered so far:

A deadlock in the NVIDIA GBM/DRM sync path under Wayland
Buffer release/fence stall between the browser GPU process and compositor
Or a compositor-level (KWin) bug not correctly flushing/stalling frame presentation

TODO list:

Test Hyprland (hyprland-nvidia-git) — to rule out KWin
Install linux-lts to test kernel behavior
Native (non-Flatpak) Brave or Chromium
X11 session

I would greatly appreciate some help!

I feel like I'm running out of things to try and would love some input on steps I should take forward to resolve this issue.

archnoob(maybe) · 2025-03-24 17:26:14

Well I go with native firefox and didn't got any problem since I started using Arch. (It has been 2 months) And your kernel seems a bit old.

Last edited by archnoob(maybe) (2025-03-24 17:27:08)

afader · 2025-03-24 19:24:02

Try libva-nvidia-driver-git

seth · 2025-03-24 21:03:42

It does not affect MPV, which plays all media fine.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=304400
This seems to hinge on kwin_wayland - for whatever reason.

Loffah · Yesterday 12:25:13

I got tired of not being able to resolve the issue so I changed from wayland plasma to hyprland and haven't had any issues in the past 2 days. Not sure what to do with this thread as the problem technically wasn't resolved.

seth · Yesterday 15:55:12

Apparently it's powerdevil related, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p2233448

Loffah · Yesterday 19:15:27

seth wrote:

Apparently it's powerdevil related, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 8#p2233448

Ah neat! Only observation from that thread that is different from mine is that I could consistently trigger the freeze every time I opened a video in my browser after having the computer on for 24 hours.
I never checked if VLC worked unfortunately but I sorta just assumed that it did.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-03-23 12:33:31