[Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

Sylphraena · 2025-08-18 17:25:56

Hello everyone I apologize if this isn't the place for this but I can't think of anywhere else to go at this point and im quite new to arch and still fairly newish in some respects to linux as a whole as i used to be very on-off with its usage.
I've been having a recurring issue that I can't troubleshoot to save my life. There are a few steam games that whenever I launch after some amount of playtime anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours will just freeze and shortly after the game freezes my entire computer locks up and I have to either hard shutdown my computer by holding the power button or pressing the reset button. It doesn't happen with every game so far its most frequent with vermintide 2 and PEAK. when I check the system journal nothing seems to be amiss but I will post the logs here just in case I am missing something. When these crashes occur I also cannot kill the processes of steam through the comman line with kill PID as i tried having all the processes listed with both the game and steam ready to be killed to swap to and kill them all to hopefully prevent a whole system crash.
other symptoms include when my computer first reboots the drive I have linux installed on is unable to be seen by my BioS until i turn my computer off and on again at which point grub gets corrupted and I have to re-install/repair it to get back into my system.

Some troubleshooting methods I've looked into so far
1. Issue first appeared on a different linux distro so I swapped to Arch in order to see if the distro was the issue as I never had it when running Manjaro or Mint (I also had been wanting to swap to arch for a while)
2. Swapping from wifi-ethernet and vice-versa as issues seem to pop up more when playing with others
3. reinstalling my OS from scratch
4. Swapping my file system from btrfs-ext4
5. Various steam launcher settings and game settings I could find that are known to cause problems with said games
6. reinstalling graphics drivers
7. monitoring system resources before/during crashes to see any abnormalities (everything seems find CPU is never above 50% usage, RAM and SWAP never above 75%, GPU usage under 60% and VRAM under 50%)
8. Installing and running an X.org desktop environment and playing through that instead of the wayland environment im currently running
9. different display managers (GDM, Ly, XFDM [i think thats what it was])
10. running the game with and without secure boot enabled
11. updating amd microcode

I havent tried running the flatpak version of steam instead of the native version yet as I wanted to avoid flatpaks and im doubtful that would solve the issue but maybe ill try that next
I also haven't tried installing a different linux kernel but since i saw the issue on OpenSUSE as well im doubtful that would help either

my system specs are
OS: Arch Linux
Kernel: Linux 6,16,1-arch1-1
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080
Memory: 16GB
Storage: Ediloca 4TB NVME SSD (plus others but none of the others are mounted anywhere on linux)

Journalctl file from most recent crash
https://pastebin.com/4P53DMKi

Last edited by Sylphraena (2025-10-12 17:05:21)

V1del · 2025-08-18 20:31:29

There's indeed nothing incirminating in that journal, but in any case you should try to avoid having to press the power button as that might well prevent cause of the crash from being synced to disk. Enable kernel sysrq and use the REISUB sequence (leaving a few secs pause especially between the "s" and the "u") when the crash happens next to safely reboot.

FWIW the time inference could also be a crash caused by the steam game recording integration, which has a bug if you have the steam overlay disabled. Is that the case? If so either reenable said overlay or in the game launch options try adding

LD_PRELOAD="" %command%

but that normally shows as a stutter and a slowdown, not a system crash

Last edited by V1del (2025-08-18 20:42:52)

Sylphraena · 2025-08-19 00:38:06

So I tried both running it in the flatpak version of steam and still was met with the same crash. I tried shutting down/rebooting with the REISUB sequence and had the same issues with my drive not showing up in BIOS after reboot until shut down and the journal seeming to have nothing relevant but maybe i'm just not seeing something indicative

I have also been running it with the overlay enabled and that command both input and not input as well as for vermintide specifically I saw somewhere that running on more than 6 threads on AMD can cause instability and limited the threads to six in the launcher settings as i've seen recommended.

pastebin for the journalctl -b -1 file again I cut out the first 2000 lines as they shouldnt be relevant to the crash and made the file too large.
https://pastebin.com/94yFnS9c

Sylphraena · 2025-08-22 18:47:14

So I have discovered some thing with testing and think I now have the problem mostly pinned down but dont know how I could solve it without buying new hardware as I think the problem is with my ssd I installed Arch onto. I tried installing arch onto a spare drive I had and everything seemed to work totally fine with no crashes in sight while have games ran and played for about 3X longer than i had been able to without crashing on my current ssd. I thought a potential fix could be do put games this is having particular issues with onto a separate hard drive but that still causes the crashes it seems arch just isn't playing nice with my NVME SSD. I saw some similar issues on another thread that suggested some kernel parameters (ioomu=soft and a couple others i dont recall) that did not help and better case ventilation to prevent the ssd from overheating but I was able to count out overheating as the problem by watching thermals and having the ssd perform fine and temps much higher than my games were able to get it to without crashing.

I would love a solution that doesn't require me needing to buy a new hard drive as the one im using I recentlyish purchased for specifically this but I don't know what else I could try. The drive works fine on windows and seems to be some issue linux has with connecting to it properly specifically while playing games as general read/write stress tests cause no issues.

solskog · 2025-08-23 02:27:09

sudo pacman -S smartmontools
sudo smartctl -t long -d nvme /dev/nvmeXYZ
sudo smartctl -a -d nvme /dev/nvmeXYZ

Install and run a long test on your nvme drive.

seth · 2025-08-23 07:06:13

some kernel parameters (ioomu=soft and a couple others i dont recall) that did not help

Please post the journal of such boot.

Sylphraena · 2025-10-12 17:08:06

So I found the issue to be with the NVME drive I believe it was a power issue (I've upgraded the computer quite a bit and never the power supply) I don't think it was getting consistent clean power. Without upgrading the power supply as it's not in my budget I swapped the NVME SSD for a sata SSD and haven't had an issue since.

Interesting I wasn't able to replicate the issue with stress tests on the drive and even on the cou/you/ram at the same time as the storage some games just eat power like nobody's business I guess.

Arch Linux

#1 2025-08-18 17:25:56

[Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

#2 2025-08-18 20:31:29

Re: [Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

#3 2025-08-19 00:38:06

Re: [Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

#4 2025-08-22 18:47:14

Re: [Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

#5 2025-08-23 02:27:09

Re: [Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

#6 2025-08-23 07:06:13

Re: [Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

#7 2025-10-12 17:08:06

Re: [Solved] Some Steam games crashing then freezing entire computer

Board footer