Change the driver I'm using

General system Newbie
1

I’m not sure if it’s the correct term, but a few weeks back I decided to change to a vulkan driver(?) from a list that had things like x32 and x64; I chose to change because I’d been having issues launching windows applications with an amd gpu. Since then, I’ve had a few crashes that could only be fixed by a hard reboot, similar to this thread which gave a lot of potential causes. Since this was the only major change I’d made before this problem happened, I hope that it’s the cause. If someone could give me the term to look up or command to run in order to get to that list of choices again I’d be very thankful.

Edit: Ok I searched it up a bit more and I’m nearly certain I want to change to the mesa x86_64, but even when I run pacman it doesn’t show up as existing so I do still need help for the specific command.

2

Can you share the output of pacman -Q | grep -E "vulkan|radeon|mesa|amd"

3 
amd-ucode 20251111-1
lib32-mesa 1:25.2.7-1
lib32-vulkan-icd-loader 1.4.328.1-1
lib32-vulkan-mesa-device-select 1:25.2.7-1
lib32-vulkan-radeon 1:25.2.7-1
linux-firmware-amdgpu 20251111-1
linux-firmware-radeon 20251111-1
mesa 1:25.2.7-1
mesa-utils 9.0.0-7
vulkan-headers 1:1.4.328.1-1
vulkan-icd-loader 1.4.328.1-1
vulkan-mesa-device-select 1:25.2.7-1
vulkan-radeon 1:25.2.7-1
vulkan-tools 1.4.328.1-1
xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0-1
4

That all looks normal to me. What specific GPU do you have?

You probably replaced the amdvlk with vulkan-radeon but that is the right thing to do. amdvlk is no longer maintained.

5

If you have issues with freezing of the screen, try adding

amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10

or

amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x12

to boot options.

6

I think that was what I switched actually; alright, I’ll look for other issues, thank you!

7

Ok, to make sure I’m not messing things up, this could be done by adding it as a unit to the systemd boot?

8

If you are using systemd-boot, you edit the file /etc/kernel/cmdline and add it to the end of the single line in that file.