SL viewer freezing with Nvidia GTX 1060 running on Linux

[Susannah Avonside]

I've been experiencing this issue for around the past two years or so since I got the Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB GRAM. I log into SL or Opensim, (the problem is less pronounced in Opensim, but still present) and in the quieter places all is usually fine, but when I go to crowded places, particularly those where there is a lot of mesh content I not only experience a level of lag that is unacceptable, (I assume partially due to a lot of badly optimised mesh objects combined with LL's miserly RAM allocation per simulator) where things rezz at a glacial rate, I soon experience momentary freezes followed by a complete system lock-up necessitating a hard reboot.

My system is as follows:

AMD Ryzen 3 1300X Quad Core 3.7GHz CPU

ASUS Prime A320M-K Motherboard 

8GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM

Zotac NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB Mini GDDR5

OS: Ubuntu Mate 18.04

 

I had similar issues when I first started using the graphics card on an older system, running on Ubuntu MATE 16.04:

AMD FX-8120 8 Core 3.10GHz

Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 HDMI Motherboard

32GB DDR3

As can be seen, both  sets of hardware are more than up to the challenges thrown at them by SL/Opensim.

Asking around, it seems that this is a 'known issue' and even Nvidia accept this, though they are backwards in coming forwards in offering any kind of real solution other than referring to bug reports that don'[t seem to offer any solution at all.

I at first thought it might be that I had a bad graphics card, but  running on Windows 10 proves that the card is fine, however, I am one someone who can use Windows as an everyday driver, as basically I detest that OS.

I'v also tried using Manjaro Linuix, but the issue remains.

If anyone else experiencing similar issues to me can shed some light on solutions, I'd be very pleased if you could let me know your suggestions.

As a general matter of interest I find that I can max out all the viewer settings in Opensim. such as running on Ultra graphics with the draw distance maxed out to 1024m and using full ALM and performance hardly affected at all, and this holds pretty much anywhere on the Opensim metaverse - with the possible exception where the region owner is running it on the proverbial redundant laptop. Certainly I find that on my one home hosted region, with an equivalent land area of 16 sims, and some 100,000 prims and around 2000 scripts taking up about 2.5 GB or RAM things remain pretty much lag free. Obviously multiple avatars teleporting in simultaneously impacts this somewhat until all their inventories have downloaded, but once things have settled down the region runs pretty well with up to 40 avatars. In comparison, Second Life might be much glitzier in many ways, but is seriously compromised by much poorer basic functionality.

Edited September 15, 2019 by Susannah Avonside
Adding information

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Are you using a 32-bit client for SecondLife in Linux, or 64-bit? My thoughts here are that a 32-bit system might not be able to properly use 6GB of video memory? From some ebay postings I have got the impression that some GT1050 cards are actually GT 520 cards with extra memory, just wondering if your GT1060 could be such?

 

I have experienced something similar using Firestorm 64-bit in Lubuntu 18.04 with a GT1050, but unlike you I've also had it slow to a crawl and then crash to desktop in Linux after visiting several Opensim regions. On Windows 10 no problems. I tolerate Windows 10 but I have seen that CPU loading is 30-40% higher than on Windows 7 for the same regions (but not the same graphics card, see following).

 

In my Windows 7 box I have had exactly as you describe in SL, crashing in regions with several avatars or lots of mesh buildings when I was using a GT 710 card with 1G Ram. I repaired my much older GT 520 512M card and put that back in and I no longer have any problems in SL (even to the point of attending the server user group meeting without jelly-dolling anybody), though I haven't used either OpenSIm or booted into Linux on that card. Yet.

 

 

[Susannah Avonside]

Thanks for the reply Profaitchikenz. No, I'm on a 64bit system, as you would perhaps expect given the hardware specs.  The 6GB of video memory is somewhat academic when we consider that the version of OpenGL used by Second Life and Opensim is ancient, not having had any work done on it since about 2006. So no half decent modern graphics card, or indeed any made in the past 10 years is going to break into a sweat on Second Life or Opensim. The issue has been around for a fair while, and it would seem that there is no fix for it thus far. My next step is to discuss this issue on the Opensim and OSGrid IRC channels, and see what comes of that. It could well be that someone will know something about the issue as more seem to run on Linux in Opensim than in Second Life.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

The reason I queried was because the official LL viewed is only available for download as an i686 file. I've heard this is because of difficulty with some of the 64-bit libraries, and wondered if the TPV's offering 64-bit downloads were also having to fall back on 32-bit libraries. It might be worth you asking the Firestorm people if they can help?

[Qie Niangao]

10 hours ago, Susannah Avonside said:

... the version of OpenGL used by Second Life and Opensim is ancient, not having had any work done on it since about 2006. So no half decent modern graphics card, or indeed any made in the past 10 years is going to break into a sweat on Second Life or Opensim.

That conclusion would make sense if the last ten years of OpenGL development were dedicated to making it ever less efficient.

Anyway, just to make sure: This is all using the proprietary nVidia drivers, right? (not Mesa?)

[Love Zhaoying]

6 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

The reason I queried was because the official LL viewed is only available for download as an i686 file. I've heard this is because of difficulty with some of the 64-bit libraries, and wondered if the TPV's offering 64-bit downloads were also having to fall back on 32-bit libraries. It might be worth you asking the Firestorm people if they can help?

I’m quite certain the official LL viewer’s had a 64-bit version for years.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

If you visit the LL download page now on a 64-bit linux machine it offers an I686 download. This then fails to initialise on a 64-bit linux system because it cannot find the libraries needed, which I am assuming will be 32-bit.

 

The thread above gives more detail on the loss of 64-bit linux support and some comments on having to use 32-bit libraries to make the LL linux viewer run.

Edited September 16, 2019 by Profaitchikenz Haiku
hunting down an old post

[cheesecurd]

Which drivers are you running? Have you updated them and are you using proprietary or the open source nouveau drivers?

I always had mountains of suttering issues with some of the proprietary driver versions in SL, specifically with a 3gb 1060 on xubuntu 16.04. Ironically moving to Windowmaker/gnustep instead reduced it, but moving to open source drivers entirely eliminated the stuttering though now at overall lower framerates.

I would suggest trying a few different older driver versions, or updating if you havent, and maybe try the open source ones as well. Make sure to purge each set of drivers as you try them and be prepared for redundancy, theres a chance in purging a driver if you dont get the install right youre just gonna get a grub menu with no video driver for the OS.

[ToniaThraw]

I have a similar problem with a similar setup. I have been using a laptop barely up to the task of viewing SL until today when I dug up my over 10 year old desktop from the mothballs. It is a lot more powerful than my laptop and retired only because it's big and my "new" place had no good place for it. But I noticed a similar problem. While my laptop took up to 6 minutes to load a relatively simple scene with lots of avatars, the desktop handled the scene in a split second (nearly no lag at all) but things still stopped moving and I got logged out from SL 3 times in close sequences on a sim I'd visited frequently before... With lots of lag but no logging out. Another sim, same  thing.

My network is very fast (according to speed tests), the desktop should be more than adequate, and yet, Firestorm stops responding and I get logged out. The difference to the laptop is phenomenal, but this problem makes SL unusable if I can't find a solution.

Edited October 3, 2019 by ToniaThraw

[Susannah Avonside]

The issue with the 32bit libraries required to run the 32 bi based viewers on 64bit Linux is that they are no longer available. i did find one workaround that worked like magic, but I lost the reference to that tutorial and I can no longer find it and can get no sense on any of the distro forums over the issue, apart from either the same old tried and failed options, or really out of date advice,  

I haven't tried the nouveau drivers as I really don't like them and as my system is a three monitor set-up I need to use the nvidia proprietary drivers. I'm sure that there are ways of getting three monitors to work under nouveau, but I don't want to faff about, and besides, though nouveau drivers have come on along way, they still don't offer decent 3D acceleration and display some weird behaviour when ALM in implemented in the viewer. I'm using the 430 driver on xubuntu, which though offers better performance and stability in both Second Life and Opensim, now randomly freezes the system, sometimes several times a day, and with no warning and completely unrelated to whether I'm in a virtual world or not. It;'s a serious issue, which isn't doing my temper much good. I feel like echoing Linus Torvalds when he exclaimed "F***ing Nvidia!"

[Solar Legion]

Honestly the solution I and one of my roomies came up with has worked rather well enough (until the bloody Intel chip degraded too much to do more than stream movies and such without causing a reboot anyway) - we abandoned Ubuntu for Manjaro, thanks mostly to the absolute BS Cannonical has pulled over the last year.

Missing a library? Manjaro's system will grab it for you and so far the AUR version of the Second Life client we use (Firestorm) has had no issues past a certain point (one of the libraries it asks for got an update that includes certain older versions/specific namings of it, negating the need for a symbolic link).

I know you likely weren't looking for what amounts to "change your distro" as an answer but .... Many of our issues - not just with Second Life - vanished when we did.

[Susannah Avonside]

Thanks Solar. I did actually try Manajro MATE, but experienced exactly the same issues, so that seems to point it being a bit of a disagreement between MATE and Nvidia. I'm now running on Xubuntu, and whilst things are much better, I still experience system freezes but they are random, and not necessarily related to Second Life/Opensim now. Totally agree with you about the Canonical BS - it often seems to me that since 10.04/10.10 things have very much gone downhill - I remember that 9.10 was a real pain with the way that audio was set up, but at least everything seemed to play nicely with Nvidia drivers.

As it happens, I really like Manajro, but when I've tried it in the past I think it was just too new and exhibited some really frustrating traits - such as being absolutely fine on initial install, but then things breaking at the first system update. There were many complaints about this in the early days. I've heard that things have progressed a lot since then. I will try it again, but my most recent experience with the MATE desktop community version didn't exactly wow me. My setup is a little unorthodox in that I have three monitors, one being  a pen monitor, and I know that the MATE desktop suits me down to the ground. I'm using XFCE, which I'm finding somewhat frustrating to use. I'm going to be rebuilding this system soon, so I'll be having a bit of a think about what distro I want to use - it might even be the time I go for a full-blown Arch install!

[Gabriele Graves]

I am not seeing any problems like this with Ubuntu Mate 18 LTS.  I am using the latest proprietary drivers and the latest 64-bit Firestorm.  I am getting great frame rates and everything is very stable.  My graphics card is a different model Nvidia though in the same series.  I know this doesn't help except to highlight that not everyone is having these issues with Ubuntu and SL.

[Solar Legion]

2 hours ago, Susannah Avonside said:

Thanks Solar. I did actually try Manajro MATE, but experienced exactly the same issues, so that seems to point it being a bit of a disagreement between MATE and Nvidia. I'm now running on Xubuntu, and whilst things are much better, I still experience system freezes but they are random, and not necessarily related to Second Life/Opensim now. Totally agree with you about the Canonical BS - it often seems to me that since 10.04/10.10 things have very much gone downhill - I remember that 9.10 was a real pain with the way that audio was set up, but at least everything seemed to play nicely with Nvidia drivers.

As it happens, I really like Manajro, but when I've tried it in the past I think it was just too new and exhibited some really frustrating traits - such as being absolutely fine on initial install, but then things breaking at the first system update. There were many complaints about this in the early days. I've heard that things have progressed a lot since then. I will try it again, but my most recent experience with the MATE desktop community version didn't exactly wow me. My setup is a little unorthodox in that I have three monitors, one being  a pen monitor, and I know that the MATE desktop suits me down to the ground. I'm using XFCE, which I'm finding somewhat frustrating to use. I'm going to be rebuilding this system soon, so I'll be having a bit of a think about what distro I want to use - it might even be the time I go for a full-blown Arch install!

Hey not a problem. We're using the XFCE variant of Manjaro as well and yeah it does have its quirks. A lot of stuff has been changed in recent months ... Heck near the start of the month enough updates came in that it almost looked like a total redesign/refactoring, very little wasn't touched.

Trade-offs, eh?