I haven’t been able to find one. Using Zorin OS which is GNOME.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
    582·
    9 months ago

    Windows has fully user space graphics drivers since Vista. Linux still utilizes kernel modules and I’m not aware of plans to move everything to user space. It’s honestly pretty cool that entire graphics driver can crash under Windows and all that happens is a bit of flickering.

    • cai@kbin.social
      19·
      9 months ago

      Are you sure? It seems like WDDM has a user-mode “User-mode display driver” - which looks to me like the HW-specific part of Mesa: it’s invoked by the D3D runtime - and a “Display miniport driver”, which is in the kernel.

      See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-vista-and-later-display-driver-model-operation-flow

      That said, no doubt Linux’s ability to reset drivers is way, way behind… We’re coming up on 20 years since Windows could recover from a graphics driver reset reliably without losing the desktop, and only partial hacks exist on Linux today.

      I really need to get around to building a sample HTML page to show how unsafe having WebGL enabled on Linux browsers is. One long shader, and your desktop is a goner.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        71·
        9 months ago

        Are you sure?

        I’m not a Windows system architect but I see the Radeon driver on my iGPU under Windows crash all the time in reproducible scenarios.

  • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
    322·
    9 months ago

    It doesn’t matter much what Linux you use. Rather what is your desktop environment? (KDE Plasma, Gnome, sway etc.)

    On KDE for example there is a shortcut to restart the compositor, which might fix your issue.

    But in general you might have luck “restarting” it by switching the tty. You do that by pressing CTRL + ALT + some function key between F1 and F8 (the standard gui tty number depends on the distro). Try to switch to a non gui tty and then back.

    For example, on my distro I would do:

    1. CTRL + ALT + F1
    2. CTRL + ALT + F2

    but on yours it might be F7 or some other.

    • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      +1 to ctrl-alt-fsomething (start at f1 and go up to move through the different virtual terminals). once in a while there are graphics problems which this will fix.

      If you’re using GNOME Shell on X you can reload the shell (and all of its extensions) with alt-f2 and then in the “Run a command” dialog that appears type r and hit enter. Unfortunately this doesn’t work in GNOME on Wayland.

    • Akip@feddit.deEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I agree with Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2 but would add

      init 3 init 5

      but I learned for my case its better to reboot if my GPU is acting up the instability would eventually come back

      • EddyBot@feddit.de
        3·
        9 months ago

        the init command probably only works in Debian nowadays givin it’s a thing from the sysvinit era

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      2·
      9 months ago

      While these can help on other issues, these will do nothing if the driver has an unrecoverable issue.

      • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        And the driver is stuffed if the hardware decides to have an unrecoverable issue.

        (I’m looking at you, Intel GuC. You dumb little bastard.)

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        If the kernel runs into a oops it can recover and you won’t notice anything except a nasty looking error in dmesg. If it runs into a panic you need to hard reboot the system as it can’t continue to run.

  • Atemu@lemmy.ml
    28·
    9 months ago

    amdgpu has a recovery mechanism built in that can be triggered using sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/N/amdgpu_gpu_recover where N is the number of the DRI device in question. You could bind a shortcut to doing that I presume.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        5·
        9 months ago

        Which part of the path does not exist?

        Is it the correct GPU number?

    • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
      1·
      9 months ago

      I have an AMDGPU machine - a hateful HP laptop with a Vega 6 chipset - and the display regularly goes garbled when I switch VTs. I too am looking for a way to “reset the graphics card” and cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/N/amdgpu_gpu_recover ain’t it: it resets it alright, but after that you get a frozen image and X is dead.

      Maybe Wayland survives that but Xorg definitely doesn’t.

      The only reliable graphics card reset solution I’ve every found was to close then reopen the laptop to force the machine to go to sleep, then wake up and go through the restart rigmarole cleanly. I wish there was a way to do that sleep-wakeup routing with a keyboard shortcut, but I haven’t found one.

      I think the real solution is to buy a decent replacement laptop though.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        2·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, Xorg (and the apps) will likely die. There is a wayland protocol in the works to be able to gracefully handle driver resets but I’m not sure on its implementation status.

  • brax
    192·
    9 months ago

    Is that function a niche thing? I’ve never needed it and don’t know anybody who has… What are some situations where it might need to be used?

    • some_random_nick@lemmy.world
      7·
      9 months ago

      I have a case. My PC at work is a HP Celeron PC. For some reason the Intel HD drivers go nuts in Office and the whole ribbon just turns black. That spreads to all other applications and makes every signel menu bar just a black rectangle. The only solution to this is to restart the driver. No driver or windows update could fix it.

      • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 months ago

        If no drivers or windows update could fix it, are you sure it’s not a hardware issue? What you describe sounds similar to bad VRAM symptoms.

        • some_random_nick@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 months ago

          Happens only in Office. No other program has ever triggered it. So it’s either Intel or HP or Windows, but since it is the lowest offering of hardware and software, probably a combination of all 3.

      • Dave.@aussie.zone
        52·
        9 months ago

        I think the question is, is it needed in your favourite Linux distro?

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    15·
    9 months ago

    Maybe sudo systemctl restart gdm? That’s not quite the same as it restarts gnome display manager.

    When your computer freezes and you can’t get to a tty with Ctrl+alt+F4 then it likely encountered a kernel panic. A panic is not recoverable. In some senerios I’ve seen the amdgpu module run into a kernel oops which is recoverable. It doesn’t really effect the desktop other than a studder as the kernel reinitializes in the background.

    If your system is freezing start by checking RAM and then try a different GPU. Its likely a hardware issue

  • ceiphas@feddit.de
    91·
    9 months ago

    There used to exist a hotkey CTRL-ALT-BKSP for restarting your current X-Session, don’t know if this still exists

    • baru@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 months ago

      That’s specific to X11. It also wasn’t always enabled for security reasons (breaking out of a locked screen). Now with Wayland there’s no standard.

    • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 months ago

      Additionally, it terminated all gui processes. Which the windows shortcut mentioned in the question doesn’t.

      • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        There is a proposal to consider making a Wayland extension where programs can sit around and re-attach to a fresh, non-deaded display server. KDE is much closer to having a working version.

    • taladar
      1·
      9 months ago

      That is just the key to kill the X server. It does not restart anything.

    • mindbleach
      43·
      9 months ago

      Stop fucking asking people to justify their use case, when they want something that clearly exists elsewhere.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        71·
        9 months ago

        It matters because Linux is different in everything, how drivers are loaded, what components can be restarted etc.

        It may not be needed or it may, and people are throwing in random solutions while the problem is not clear

        • mindbleach
          21·
          9 months ago

          It’s a horrible kludge of a feature that fixes weird problems. That’s gonna be true regardless of OS, and regardless of which exact problems OP has.

          • billgamesh@lemmy.ml
            4·
            9 months ago

            I’m not sure that’s true in a lot of linux use cases. Linux and windows handle drivers very differently. There are a lot of graphics problems which have nothing to do with the driver, and when they do it’s usually wrong driver instead of driver acting up

            • mindbleach
              14·
              9 months ago

              Then OP will find out this isn’t something they need.

              You should still answer the question, instead of questioning the question.

              It is infuriating how every technical question has to be justified, as if ‘why do you want that?’ is always a relevant and wise question. Even though it’s omnipresent, effortless, and adds literally nothing by itself.

              • Pantherina@feddit.de
                41·
                9 months ago

                “I want to get rid of my hair, how do I shave my hair on Linux”

                “Why do you want to get rid of your hair?”

                'Because when I didnt have sissors before on Windows, I always shaved it to have it not annoy me"

                “But now that you have sissors, why not just cut it”?

                • mindbleach
                  14·
                  9 months ago

                  Making up a stupid analogy totally excuses the million derailed threads where someone genuinely just needs something you don’t.

                  Stop letting your ignorance prevent them from solving their ignorance. Answer the goddamn question, first. Feel free to snit at them - after.