Hello @pstn, this reads like a video driver issue and should also be mentioned to your video driver vendor if it hasn't been already.
Yes, I forgot to mention that. It indeed looks like a driver bug, but it also seems to have something to do with Fossilize and might be of interest to it's developers.
It turned out to be 100% a driver issue without any weird invocations from steam.
Since people were asking: This is an issue with mesa 18.x. Upgrade to mesa 19.x to fix.
Nothing extracted yet.
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
When starting steam with amdgpu on linux 5.1.0 it crashes my xorg with a GPU reset.
Log:
It seems to happen during this phase of the steam launch (it's the last thing I see on the screen before the GPU crashes)
Steps for reproducing this issue: