Comment by sgtnoodle
3 years ago
This is one of the primary reasons I bought a Steam Deck. I happen to run Arch Linux on a zen 3 and RDNA 2 desktop, and quite like the idea of a team of engineers being paid to keep things running smoothly. Indeed, I've been actively following a freedesktop.org issue ticket tracking AMDGPU suspend/resume driver issues, and one of these developers found a regression while testing the next Steam OS Deck release.
I've also been enjoying using the Deck. I'm currently playing through L.A. Noire, graphics settings maxed out. It's great being able to pick it up and start playing within seconds, the game running while suspended.
I applied the same logic as you when I picked my laptop (6800U so Zen 3 and RDNA 2, using Arch) but unfortunately it has not been a very smooth sailing. It works well enough for daily driving and the performance is amazing but the GPU glitches and crashes are frequent enough to be annoying.
It seems that the firmware is to blame because only BIOS updates seem to fix the GPU bugs I encounter.
Did you muck with the kernel boot option to enable frequency and voltage adjustments? If so, the Arch wiki advice to set the bitmask to 0xffffffff will cause you problems. At some point they added an "async" driver mode that is incredibly glitchy, and it is enabled by one of those bits.
That caused me grief for many months until I figured it out. I updated Arch wiki about a month ago, and provided a command to compute a bit mask that avoids setting unnecessary feature bits.