Arch Linux

thecatfromouterspace

Member

Registered: Today

Posts: 1

KDE Plasma crash after global update

Just updated all my system and KDE Plasma simply crashed each time it boots.

Reached to solve this by downgrading the linux firmware thanks to my friend gemini

Anyone else?

5hridhyan

Member

Registered: 2025-12-25

Posts: 1,052

Website

Re: KDE Plasma crash after global update

Great, But which firmware are you talking about? the recent AMD chaos?

What are you asking here? Validation from other fellow users? I doubt if that is supported here.

Last edited by 5hridhyan (Today 18:39:48)

Noirdragen

Member

Registered: Today

Posts: 1

Re: KDE Plasma crash after global update

Great, But which firmware are you talking about? the recent AMD chaos?

I take it, that's a well-known issue by now, then?
Something like https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2309521?
AFAICT, that thread originally focused on AMD iGPUs and freezes during boot, not login.
But to be fair, someone later wrote in that thread that dGPUs also seem to be affected.
I assume there's probably a few more threads that I overlooked.

Anyway, while I can't speak for thecatfromouterspace, I'd like to try and make this thread a little more helpful for anyone stumbling upon it.

First off, I'm on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Kernel 7.2.4-arch1-2.
The symptoms are that the system freezes when trying to log into KDE/Wayland from SDDM.
Switching to a TTY instead works, however.

Downgrading all linux-firmware packages also "fixed" the problem for me.
That might have been a bit overkill, but I wanted them all to stay on the same version, since they seem to be versioned together, to avoid any potential mismatch-issues (if that is even possible).

Checking journalctl listed several issues related to the amdgpu driver, stuff like this:

...
kernel: amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* flip_done timed out
...
kernel: amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* [PLANE:206:plane-3] commit wait timed out
...
kernel: amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: device lost from bus!
kernel: amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: SMU: bus error for message: DisallowGfxOff(41) response:0xFFFFFFFF 
kernel: in params:00000000
kernel: amdgpu 0000:03:00.0: Failed to disable gfxoff!
kwin_wayland[1330]: Pageflip timed out! This is a bug in the amdgpu kernel driver
...

... which does not look too nice to put it mildly.

So, after also taking a look at /var/log/pacman.log, I downgraded all linux-firmware* packages from 20260910-1 to 20260810-2, since they seemed the most suspicious from the last few updates I applied.

I used these steps to do so:

1. Downgrade linux-firmware from 20260910-1 to 20260810-2.

2. Uninstall linux-firmware-amd and linux-firmware-ti.

3. Downgrade the remaining linux-firmware-* packages (which were in my case):

   • linux-firmware-amdgpu

   • linux-firmware-atheros

   • linux-firmware-broadcom

   • linux-firmware-cirrus

   • linux-firmware-intel

   • linux-firmware-mediatek

   • linux-firmware-nvidia

   • linux-firmware-other

   • linux-firmware-radeon

   • linux-firmware-realtek

   • linux-firmware-whence

I had to downgrade linux-firmware before downgrading the rest, since the new version introduced the linux-firmware-amd and linux-firmware-ti packages.
Attempting to downgrade all at once leads to file owner issues with the packages, since some files seem to have been moved to the two new packages.

Last edited by Noirdragen (Today 21:27:19)