[Bug 247441] graphics/gpu-firmware-kmod and or graphics/drm-fbsd11.2-kmod crashing 11.2 to 11.4 with a Radeon HD 5770 card

[bugzilla-noreply at freebsd.org]

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=247441

--- Comment #10 from Scott Bennett <bennett at sdf.org> ---
     I had not been aware that a stable/11 revision became unsupported in under
80 days.
     11.2+ and 12 have kernel bugs in memory management that necessitate
reboots every few days to return the system to usability.  That time period can
be extended if the kinds of things run on the system are very limited and
some sysctl variables are properly tweaked.  However, whether sooner or later,
a reboot is necessary.  For example, since my most recent reboot, the system
has remained up for a bit over 28 days, but it will have to be rebooted soon
because the pagedaemon is taking 60% to 100% of one core in searching for page
frames it can return to the free list because the free list has finally dropped
below 410 MB, the amount I set vm.pageout_wakeup_thresh because it appears to
be the minimum necessary for the kernel to start paging in a process that has
been marked a swapped out, even something as small as /bin/sh.  An OS that
needs a reboot every few days (usually between 3 and 9) is not a production
version by any stretch of the imagination.  We lived with such things in the
1960s, but things were also expected to be better in the future.  They *were*
better for quite a while, but apparently FreeBSD has reversed course in that
respect.
     As for your questions, I thought my previous response was clear enough,
but then, I thought my original description was, too.  Apparently, neither was.
I have not, at present, any reason good enough to justify the lost time to do
an upgrade to 12.1, whether -RELEASE or -STABLE.  Has there been any change to
gpu-firmware-kmod for stable/11 since 28 April 2020?  If not, then I would
expect the GPU hangs to remain a problem.  If so, please advise, and I will
rebuild gpu-firmware-kmod.  Has radeonkms.ko had any changes to how it is
intended to respond to a GPU hang?  If the GPU hangs may have been fixed, then
it may not matter so much whether DRM has been fixed, at least until the next
GPU-hanging bug is introduced into firmware for a card.  If the firmware is
still buggy, but DRM's response may have changed, then I will try it.  If not,
then there appears to be no reason for me to waste the time on it.
     So please do let me know whether each port has been updated in a way that
may help.
     I have never run -CURRENT and don't intend to do so unless conceivably in
a VM.  I only have one functional machine.  By today's standards it is now
slow, so I don't want to divert it very much from the work I have it doing.

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