protonscr

All recent Protons (>= 6.x) crash on a Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard (CPU/GPU change doesn't help)

protonclosed
ValveSoftware/Proton#8953 · opened 2025-08-06 by jcapik · updated 2025-08-13 · 7 comments · github
Jjcapik 2025-08-06 github

Compatibility Report

  • Name of the game with compatibility issues: all games I've tried

System Information

  • GPU:
    [Previous] ZOTAC GeForce GT 430
    [Current] Radeon RX 570 Armor 8G OC
  • Video driver version: Mesa 23.2.1-1ubuntu3.1~22.04.3
  • Kernel version: 6.8.0-65-generic (68~22.04.1-Ubuntu)
  • Link to full system information report as Gist:
    https://gist.github.com/jcapik/b0ba6e8851bc3ac7e889e4db935b37d4
  • Proton version:
    5.0-10 and older WORK
    5.13-6 get's stuck forever
    6.3-8 and newer CRASH

I confirm:

  • [x] that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
  • [x] that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

No steam-$APPID.log got generated for proton 6.x and higher.
I only have a log file for 5.0-10

Symptoms

I have two computers with different hardware parts. One of them works with all Proton versions and one of them fails with Proton 5.13 and higher.
I've tried to change CPU and GPU and the issue persists. So, my guess is that it could be caused by something on the motherboard (Gigabyte Z97-HD3) or it's speed/age related since the failing computer is way older than the working one. However, it survived all crash tests and memory checks are passing.

Reproduction

All games I tried failed, so ... it doesn't seem to be related to the game title

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2025-08-06 github

Hello @jcapik, no generated Proton log hints that something went awry before Proton had a chance to start at all. If you completely close Steam, then run steam from a terminal, are there any hints in the terminal spew when you tell Steam to start an affected game? Alternatively, you can look at ~/.steam/steam/logs/console-linux.txt for the same terminal spew.

Also, mesa 23.2 is badly out of date at this point. It may be worthwhile to try mesa from a PPA like kisak-mesa stable, but that's something to ponder after you've figured out why Proton isn't trying to run at all.

Please copy the contents of Steam Runtime Diagnostics from Steam (Steam -> Help -> Steam Runtime Diagnostics) and put it in a gist, then include a link to the gist in this issue report.

Jjcapik 2025-08-06 github

I see two "*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated" messages. Any chance to debug this further?

Jjcapik 2025-08-06 github
Jjcapik 2025-08-06 github

Just a note ... if I go to the Proton dir and run the wine/wine64 binary directly, passsing winecfg as the first argument, then it seems to run correctly ... not sure what in the middle causes the stack smashing

Kkisak-valve maintainer 2025-08-06 github

Thanks for checking, your trouble is coming from the NVIDIA 390 series driver install which has a hard time with the Steam Linux Runtime environment that led to Vulkan being unusable in the Steam Linux Runtime container environments (https://gist.github.com/jcapik/13e5a80c4604fe025e40f01e1acad60b#file-gistfile1-txt-L1221-L1234) and https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/420.

Your best option is to purge the NVIDIA 390 driver install, then after that evaluate if you need a current point release of mesa.

This is functionally the same issue as https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/420. Closing in favor of the older issue report.

Jjcapik 2025-08-07 github

That's strange. I tried to purge all nvidia-390 leftovers before the tests yesterday. So, maybe I forgot to remove something or it's still there despite calling 'apt remove --purge' for all packages containing 'nvidia'. Gonna try again this evening. Thank you.

Jjcapik 2025-08-13 github

Just wanna confirm it really was caused by nvidia-390 leftovers. Thank you.

Proton versions

Upstream links