[arch-general] intel gpu hang

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 19:27:21 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Tue, 12 Jan 2021 09:03:16 +0100, Bennett Piater wrote:
>>https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon and run the 
>>browser from tmpfs.
>>The other reason to do this is that the browser feels much faster as 
>>well :)  
>
>Thank you, I'll take a look at this.

Hi,

IMO this is asking for more trouble than it probably could solve.

A browser that is listed as supported, Firefox [3], requires a
workaround [2].
It offers an option that "may lead to privilege escalation" [4].
Let alone that I'm sceptic that a quite complicated hack adds
"Transparent user experience" [1]. Apart from this I'm allergic
against the "Reduced wear to physical drives" argument. I know that
some people buy sneakers and instead of wearing the sneakers, they keep
them boxed, to reduce wear. I prefer to walk in shoes, to open doors
by wearing out handles and I use SSDs without taking care of write
cycles. Apart from trimming, I treat them like I treated HDDs and didn't
experience SSD lifespans shorter than those of HDD lifespans.

My guess is, that the tmpfs approach does offer better performance for
some use cases, but it unlikely does affect my usage of Firefox, used
to have 2 Wiki tabs opened or similar. I can get rid of hangs by
migrating back to 4.19.x kernels and the "intel" driver, which
additionally allows me to use Chrome again and would not take extra
space from my 3.9G tmpfs (8 GiB RAM).

Anyway, thank you again, at least it is interesting to know that this
approach does exist. It might be handy in the future, it's just not the
right thing for my usage at this moment.

Regards,
Ralf

[1]
"Design goals and benefits of psd

    1. Transparent user experience
    2. Reduced wear to physical drives
    3. Speed" -
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon#Design_goals_and_benefits_of_psd

[2]
"Note: Some browsers such as [snip] Firefox [snip] actually keep their
cache directories separately from their profile directory. It is not
within the scope of profile-sync-daemon to modify this behavior; users
are encouraged to refer [snip] to the Firefox on RAM article for several
workarounds." -
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon#Design_goals_and_benefits_of_psd

[3]
"Currently, the following browsers are auto-detected and managed:

    [snip]
    Firefox (all flavors including stable, beta, and nightly)
    [snip]" -
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon#Supported_browsers

[4]
"Warning: Usage of psd in overlayfs mode (in particular,
psd-overlay-helper) may lead to privilege escalation." -
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Profile-sync-daemon#What_is_overlayfs_mode