Arch Linux

matteoguglielmi

Member

Registered: 2015-01-17

Posts: 33

Very Weird Bug: Intel Meteor Lake-P GPU Load Drops To 0% After a While

Hello,

what I am reporting in this post is a bug (I hope!) that I've never seen before for the way it presents itself.

To trigger it, I need to start streaming with OBS and wait for about 30 to 45 minutes.

After that amount of time, the very first (weird) manifestation or symptom of the bug is the absence of any GPU load (0%), as reported by tools like btop or intel_gpu_top.

Despite the apparent absence of GPU load, everything is still very much accelerated (sooth YouTube videos playback, smooth Twitch video streams, OBS still streaming at 60 fps, CPU load around 5%) but not for too long.

Usually it takes 5 more minutes before the system becomes totally unresponsive, with all applications shutting down one after the other.

I have never seen anything like this because there are no logs reporting the crash of the GPU.

System specs:

#> dmidecode --string system-product-name
NUC14RVH-B

#> lspci -nn | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Meteor Lake-P [Intel Arc Graphics] [8086:7d55] (rev 08)

#> uname -r
6.15.8-arch1-1

#> cat /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf 
options i915 enable_guc=3

#> obs --version
OBS Studio - 31.1.1

EDIT #1: OBS is not causing the issue, it just accelerates its manifestation.

EDIT #2: I can confirm this is a bug (probably a kernel bug - I run linux-lts) since I own two NUC14s with the same Intel GPU and both are affected in exactly the same weird way (NUC13s are not affected, I have a couple of them too).

EDIT #3: I tested the NUC14 with both the latest linux and linux-lts kernels, and the bug is present in both.

EDIT #4: I tested the xe driver (regular kernel booted with i915.force_probe=!7d55 xe.force_probe=7d55, but the two NUC14 do crash real bad almost immediately after opening anything that uses the 7d55 GPU) .

If you own a NUC14 with such a GPU (7d55), please let me know if your GPU is affected by the same issue where the GPU load suddenly drops to 0% - (see btop image linked above).

I copied this post to the kernel & Hardware section.

Thank you.

Last edited by matteoguglielmi (2025-07-29 13:31:28)

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