The Linux Thread!

[sal_vager]

I've not run into this specific issue as far as I remember, if prefs is correct or absent it should be working.

What resolutions are you getting though?

[azander]

prefs is absent, I make sure of that before loading KSP every time.

It starts out with the correct resolution, then sometime during the load it changes.  Usually just before the squad logo appears.

 

The different solutions I get are:

0x720, 1280x10, 1x1,  0x0, 1280x1. 10x720, and less often others.

 

[waterlubber]

I am also getting the OOM crashes. The small script on the Known Issues page does not work, it still crashes my X server (I get booted back to my login manager)

 

Running Debian 8 Jessie with Openbox and AMD fglrx Catalyst Drivers. 

 

Edit: Apparently, this script works:
 

Spoiler

#!/bin/bash

WINWIDTH=1366
WINHEIGHT=768


# change dir to script location
cd "$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")")"

printf "Fixing weird permissions from game archive.\n"
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 "{}" \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 "{}" \;
chmod 755 KSP.x86  KSP.x86_64  Launcher.x86  Launcher.x86_64 "$(basename "$0")"

if [ -z "$(pidof pulseaudio)" ]
then
	printf "No pulseaudio? Avoiding crash by linking pulseaudio lib to /dev/null.\n"
	[ "$(readlink -f libpulse-simple.so.0)" != "/dev/null" ] && ln -sf /dev/null libpulse-simple.so.0
	export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"
else
	if [ "$(readlink -f libpulse-simple.so.0)" = "/dev/null" ]
	then
		printf "Decided to switch to pulseaudio? removing workaround link...\n"
		rm libpulse-simple.so.0
	fi
fi

if [ -d "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/unity3d" ]
then
    printf "removing \"${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/unity3d\" because it breaks things!\n"
    rm "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/unity3d" -rf
fi

printf "Still can not learn languages? setting LC_ALL=C\n"
export LC_ALL=C
unset LANGUAGE

{
	COUNT=0
	printf "Starting window geometry guard...\n"
	while [ "$COUNT" -lt "180" ] && pidof KSP.x86_64 > /dev/null
	do
		sleep 1
		WIDTH=$(xwininfo -name "Kerbal Space Program" | grep -o 'Width:[[:space:]]*[0-9]\+' | grep -o '[0-9]\+')
		HEIGHT=$(xwininfo -name "Kerbal Space Program" | grep -o 'Height:[[:space:]]*[0-9]\+' | grep -o '[0-9]\+')
		[ "$WIDTH" -gt "$(( $WINWIDTH * 2 ))" ] && { printf "Window geometry is freaky (${WIDTH}x${HEIGHT}), killing KSP!\n" >&2 ; killall KSP.x86_64 ; exit 0 ; }
		[ "$HEIGHT" -gt "$(( $WINHEIGHT * 2 ))" ] && { printf "Window geometry is freaky (${WIDTH}x${HEIGHT}), killing KSP!\n" >&2 ; killall KSP.x86_64 ; exit 0 ; }
		COUNT=$(( $COUNT + 1 ))
	done
	printf "Window geometry guard no longer needed.\n"
} &

sh -c 'sleep 1 ; printf "Bumping KSP OOM killer score in case it goes berserk and chews up all the memory at once.\n" ; echo 15 > "/proc/$(pgrep KSP.x86_64)/oom_adj" ; printf "KSP OOM score: " ; cat "/proc/$(pgrep KSP.x86_64)/oom_score"' &

printf "Launching. Hold on to yer helmets and pray the Kraken!\n"
# glcore versions: 32, 33, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45.
# if running pre-broadwell intel choose 33
# if running any intel and it is still 2016, choose 33
# check driver news, i.e. on phoronix.com
exec ./KSP.x86_64 -force-glcore42 -force-gfx-direct -screen-fullscreen 0 -screen-width $WINWIDTH -screen-height $WINHEIGHT

 

I found it a bit earlier in the thread, posted by @Psycho_zs (Thanks!)

Another interesting bug, sometimes the game will load in the background, but with a black screen. When it finishes, music plays, still black screen.

Edited July 29, 2016 by waterlubber

[azander]

I was getting that too with that long script.  It never happened bore I started using it.    Haven't had a chance to debug it yet so I can only confirm it happening at this point.

 

 

[Xasin]

Small input from a guy with a Dual-Monitor setup here.

I have tried out /every/ possible configuration method (Removind the prefs file, -force-glcore just leaves a black screen, OOM Killer doesn't prevent crash, KSP Geometry guard script isn't working), yet none of those have worked so far.
My guess is that the game sizes itself for the second screen, which is 1920x1080, but gets placed onto the primary screen, which is 1280x1024. This then causes similar problems to an oversized KSP Window and crashes the XServer - However I have no proof of that!!

Anyhow, here is a resolution that seems to work very reliably for me:
 - Add "-screen-width *** -screen-height ***" to the launch options, and set these to a size that fits into the monitor that KSP "spawns" into.
After KSP has started you can then drag the window onto the main display, and set the size of the window. It's annoying, but it works.

Using ElementaryOS Freya, GTX 660 with proprietary drivers v367.35 and kernel 4.3.0
Two displays: 1280x1024 and 1920x1080

[sal_vager]

On 31/07/2016 at 4:15 PM, Xasin said:

Small input from a guy with a Dual-Monitor setup here.

Have you tried adding -adapterN to this? It only works for KSP when it's fullscreen though.

[Psycho_zs]

Perhaps geometry reporting is influenced by WM and openbox is faster at updating geometry data. Geometry guard works on my setup at least in half of the cases, reporting resolutions as high as 60K-something by 30K-somenting, or as goofy as 62842x1.

Other times KSP manages to jam the system before the guard can kill it, but eventually it will still get to it faster than OOM killer.

 

I've just upgraded mesa packages to 12.0.1 from Debian experimental, and despite having Ivy Bridge chip, managed to bump -force-glcore value from 33 to 45 (still getting empty dialogs without this option). This at least allowed me to enable 2x shadow cascades without any glitches. Yay!

Launch (in)stablity and performance seems to be unaffected.

[JoelleEmmily]

On 2016-07-26 at 3:34 PM, JoelleEmmily said:

I realize one's not really supposed to ask for help regarding mods on this thread, however, I believe this fault is unique to linux, and it seems the developer doesn't have a lot of experience with it.

The problem is a graphics bug while using scatterer, original post to the dev is here: https://github.com/LGhassen/Scatterer/issues/18 , which results in hard "terrain" and "navigational" lines on planet and sky textures. Also, and I didn't notice this before, no clouds appear while in orbit.

I can't try his anisotropic filtering suggestion, as I haven't found a way to change the setting without recompiling mesa. I have tried changing in game setting, but that has resulted in no change to the bug. If run KSP without the force-glcore switch, the game appears to no longer be affected by the bug, but all the other problems, such as missing buttons and misaligned shadows, come back.

Okay, so, what I've discovered. Either mesa, KSP, or Unity3d, don't support OpenGL 3.x very well. As everyone knows, 3.0 will not render dialogue boxes properly, and I've discovered 3.3 has shading and layering bugs. I upgraded my vid card and dloaded the newest ver of mesa, and forcing 4.x seems to fix the Scatterer issue I reported.

 

Unfortunately, another issue has popped up. Some mods' (procedural parts is an example) textures do not... render (I guess) properly in the VAB. What happens, is that they can be seen through the bottom border of the part selector while scrolling. This then leads to a glitch upon reentering the VAB, whereby all the borders, including the control bar at the top with save/load/exit, disappear and repair. They don't flicker, they reload on interaction.

 

Anyone have any thoughts on how to isolate and resolve?

[sal_vager]

That sounds like the Unity stencilling @JoelleEmmily, it can occur when using a lower resolution than your desktop while in fullscreen, matching KSP's resolution to the desktop should prevent it.

[JoelleEmmily]

Thanks @sal_vager.

I think we've spoken several times on other KSP stuff, so thanks for all the help you've provided. I've noticed that Procedural Parts is the only mod being affected by this glitch, so it might be specific to them. Also, the HUD flashing might be something else, I'm not sure. There's a possibility I've caused my Ubuntu install to become unstable with all my testing and edge driver installing.

I have a bit of a problems with Ubuntu as well, aside from what I've already stated. 16.04 isn't the bast release for playing KSP, and amongst other things, the ATI proprietary drivers are not yet supported, but I have other programs which require the updated libraries in 16, so I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. Are you running 16? Or are you still on one of the 15 releases? Or are you not using Ubuntu at all?

Edited August 10, 2016 by JoelleEmmily

[sal_vager]

I'm using Xubuntu 16.04, so I have the xfce desktop, I seem to be avoiding the graphics resolution issues that are reported on the Gnome and Unity DE's, maybe it's worth installing xfce and selecting it at login?

I've had no real issues with 16.04 or with KSP, the only time I had problems was with an older kernel update causing the PC to lock up, but that's since been fixed.

Also I'm using Nvidia, though I hear that Unity have improved their support for AMD with newer versions of their editor.

[JoelleEmmily]

Sorry, I should have clarified that I was using Linux Mint XFCE. I had an older vid card before, bleh, when did a top of the line vid card from five years ago become "old", that was no longer supported by ATI's linux drivers. It caused a variety of problems. I only really upgraded a week ago, and I installed the mesa edge "stable & optimized" drivers, and that seemed to solve a lot, but it also seems to cause stability issues. Virtualbox , FireFox, and KSP, all suffer from random uncommanded shutdowns, with no log entries as to why. It's like they just disappear from memory. Firefox at least launches that annoying debug reporter, but it has no useful info. It's annoying, and happens at the worst time! Like after spending two hours building a craft without save! I', probably just going to reinstall and start over again. Do you know of anyone else having problems with oibaf's release of mesa?

[sal_vager]

I don't know of issues with oibaf no but I do keep seeing people with issues with Mint, and I don't think it's as good as everyone says.

Which card are you using @JoelleEmmily? I'd avoid the fglrx from the repos, but as you're using oibaf I know you're doing that already.

I'd like to support AMD, but drivers :/

Maybe AMDGPU will actually work.

[JoelleEmmily]

Alright @sal_vager, based on your recommendation, I'll switch to Xubuntu, Mint released me from their testing team anyway. I didn't have enough time to contribute. Also, I might try AMDGPU, I hadn't known it existed before, thanks!

I've also been brand loyal to AMD, since the 90s! At the time they were the best, but, that seems to have started changing with ATI's acquisition. :/ Bleh. In a perfect world, more people would abandoned Winblows for linux. I try to tell everyone, it's not like it was 10 years ago, it's a lot easier to use now. A larger user base, would mean better support. Ahh, in a perfect world.

[sal_vager]

You should check what cards AMDGPU supports first @JoelleEmmily as it's their new official open source driver, I think it works with the new RX480, the Fury and similar.

Also you may want to try Xubuntu in a spare partition first, rather than losing your Mint install, in case it's not to your liking.

And yeah, in a perfect world Linux would be the main OS, and in many ways it is, servers and embedded systems use Linux far more than any other OS

[Kerbal101]

1 hour ago, JoelleEmmily said:

Alright @sal_vager, based on your recommendation, I'll switch to Xubuntu, Mint released me from their testing team anyway. I didn't have enough time to contribute. Also, I might try AMDGPU, I hadn't known it existed before, thanks!

I've also been brand loyal to AMD, since the 90s! At the time they were the best, but, that seems to have started changing with ATI's acquisition. :/ Bleh. In a perfect world, more people would abandoned Winblows for linux. I try to tell everyone, it's not like it was 10 years ago, it's a lot easier to use now. A larger user base, would mean better support. Ahh, in a perfect world.

Its other way around. Linux support has been virtually non-existent in ATI, with FireGLX driver (proprietary professional driver) supporting only professional FireGL cards and only on very specific distributions and specific applications. Compared to Nvidia, ATI was utterly unusable in Linux, to the extent that starting a simple 3d game would crash the OS. There was attempt to write an open working driver, which had only basic support.

Only when AMD bought them, AMD began the opensource driver (called "radeon") effort. In mere 3 years(2011-2014), from near zero featureset "radeon" has reached very wide hardware support, OpenGL went from 1.0 to 3.3 (currently nearing OpenGL 4.5), hardware video acceleration and good reclocking was implemented. The old proprietary crash-friendly FireGLX driver was also refactored and started sharing the same team as Windows "Catalyst" driver (hence, also renamed to "Catalyst for Linux").

Since 2014-2016 the new open driver, based on "radeon", was introduced ("amdgpu"). The difference is that part of the open driver ("amdgpu") is used also by proprietary driver (Catalyst name dropped,  now "amdgpu+")- so they share the same (open) codebase in kernel. The only difference is in user space (regular programs), where "amdgpu+" is a) proprietary b) contains still patented stuff b)designed to support newest cards until base driver catches up.
 

I play KSP on "old" HD5850 Evergreen using open driver "radeon", which was fully supported since 2013 and continues to be supported.
The proprietary driver even today should be only used if open driver does not work, which can only be the case of very very new card.

On 8/6/2016 at 4:09 AM, JoelleEmmily said:

Okay, so, what I've discovered. Either mesa, KSP, or Unity3d, don't support OpenGL 3.x very well.

 

Unity incorrectly detects featureset of open driver, which leads to crashing and absent text. The solution is to limit the OpenGL level manually, and even then current 1.1.3 may crash on start - but afterwards runs rock solid. Except the regular well-known bugs ofc. The 1.0.5 had absolutely no graphics-related issues, aside from non-working antialiasing.

[JoelleEmmily]

@Kerbal101 What I'd meant to say was, that the construction of ATI (I said AMD), their chipsets, and the overall quality of their cards, was the best in the 90s, and out paced the other manufacturers. When AMD acquired ATI, quality seemed to slip significantly. Cost to benchmark fell after that, and I find that even in winblows, ATI card just don't give the same graphics level as an nvidea of the same cost. Also their decision to licenses their chipsets out to other manufacturers also seemed to cause a down turn in quality, and affected market consistency. At one time, ATI cards were made by ATI, and you knew if you bought any card of the same chipset, it'd be comparable, now, whether its constructed by asus or msi or what have you, matters.

I remember when I bought the first all-in-wounder (which I still have in its original box), I was in love with the thing. I played Dungeon Keeper and MDK while the TV sat in the background. I never had a problem with it, and as of last year, still worked in a machine. Todays ATI, I don't know. To me, they seem over priced and constantly buggy. My mother, also a gamer and a techie, dropped them for nvideo years go, and she basically refuses to go back to them.

The drivers aspect to things, I'm far from knowledgeable. I tend to go on what other people say.

@sal_vager I've used Xubuntu and Lubuntu, as well as a bunch of other distros. They're basically all the same to me, eventually, I add source repositories and change the intended release. I just liked the default install of Mint better, nothing overly important.

[Kerbal101]

19 hours ago, JoelleEmmily said:

@Kerbal101 What I'd meant to say was, that the construction of ATI (I said AMD), their chipsets, and the overall quality of their cards, was the best in the 90s, and out paced the other manufacturers. When AMD acquired ATI, quality seemed to slip significantly.

Let's start from what I owned from ATi..

The first one was Radeon 7500 64 DDR which is still lying around and works. I played with GeForce 256 and then purchased Asus GeForce2 MX400 to compare. The performance of R100 was in same league of MX, although advertized to compete with GeForce2 GTS, it failed. Sum up: ATi to Nvidia ratio was okay.

A also had Radeon 8500 (non LE model), which was quite an improvement and similar to GeForce3 series. Sum up: ATi improved to Nvidia.

I shortly had hand on ATi 9800Pro, which is truely quite a beast, easily competing with GeForce6800GT (which I later also had, Asus V9999). Unfortunately my card died soon from bad ball soldering and turned out was in need of reballing, so I had to sell it. Sum up: ATi was adequate or even winning to Nvidia.

The next era Nvidia introduced 8800 GT chip (g80) which was incredibly good scalar chip. It was subsequently "improved" first in lower nm and then pushed by transistor beef. What does ATi do? It started to push a newer generation literally each year -- which lead to very poor driver quality on MS Doors. I had ownership of 8800, 9800GT and GTX260sp216, which blew the hell of all ATI cards right until and including the HD4xxx series (which were quite impressive) appear. I skipped the whole ATI generation wagon until (and owned) HD4650. I almost purchased HD4850, but got a good deal with GTX260sp216 - so skipped it.

The problem happened between 9800Pro and right through the HD4000. They changed architecture very often, for example 9500/9700/9800, X800, X1800 and HD2xxx were all quite different. The HD3000-4000 were also different, but luckily quite potent. The ATI driver quality became really bad due to constant internal changes and this is very likely because of how they decided to build their cards. Nvidia simply took one chip (G80/8800) and scaled it down as needed. Also its around this time when I started experimenting with Linux for real, and got a taste of their driver support with HD4650.

It was only release of Evergreen / HD5xxx series, which turned the favors for ATI -- but they were already near the end and were purchased by AMD. Only Evergreen architecture became powerful enough to maintain status quo and beat Nvidia long enough -- until Nvidia released the Fermi (Thermi, from trollish- "egg cooking on GPU"). Only Fermi caught up and Evergreen, and now AMD stopped the constant generation jump and released improved HD6xxx, and only later went Nvidia route and dropped the VLIW (HD3xxx-HD6xxx).

So right now, you can agree that Nvidia's hardware is better than of AMD (there are a lot of caveats and faults in some cards), but this is hardly due to AMD policy. Quite opposite, AMD saved ATI and managed to carry them through, although itself experiencing financial troubles in CPU area due to Bulldozer bad performance on low load applications and excessive electricity use on full load.

Personally, I am still stuck with HD5850 because of how awesome this GPU is - and how awesome the open driver became since end of 2014. I wanted to get HD7950 (instead of RX200/300), but now I wait how good the RX4x0 will hold to the word "best fps bang for the buck" because currently I simply have no use for the ultra-high FPS load modern GPUs offer in my spare time. Or I am getting old. Eitherway - no denying that Nvidia went the performance route, but so is their price, and last time I checked their driver was still proprietary, where AMD is either open or semi-open (AMDGPU+) upon your choice, so they both have their market segments and the hands of Linux gamer are not tied up, unlike in ATI era.

[JoelleEmmily]

@Kerbal101 My first ATI was the VGA Wonder+, then I might have had a mach, but I can't remember exactly; then I had two Rages, one of which was the Rage II, the other might have been a Fury but that could have been my boyfriend at the time's; then an All-in-Wonder Pro, which could have been my other Rage, a 7200 DDR, 9700 Pro, All-in-Wonder 9700 or 9600 Pro, can't remember which but I ran it for a VERY long time; then one of the first hydravision cards, though I don't remember which one. After that, I had three more ATI cards, but I stopped being a gamer, or all that into computers really, and stop taking note of the hardware I owned. Now I have an "oldish" HD6950, which, I bought a little less than a year ago with the intention of of putting it in a submerged system, but never got around to installing it until a week or so ago. I'ma a dweeb, I know.

@sal_vager Installed and upgraded to the oibaf release of mesa. Everything seems to work. I might try AMDGPU, but I knew oibaf worked, so, I stuck with it. Thanks! I'm still getting the odd "parts through" hud thing.

I'll likely open a ticket with them as soon as I know it's not something I'm doing wrong.

[sal_vager]

13 minutes ago, JoelleEmmily said:

Installed and upgraded to the oibaf release of mesa. Everything seems to work. I might try AMDGPU, but I knew oibaf worked, so, I stuck with it. Thanks! I'm still getting the odd "parts through" hud thing.

I'll likely open a ticket with them as soon as I know it's not something I'm doing wrong.

That looks like the Unity stencilling is failing with that driver, stencils or masks control what can be seen on a layer.

It might disappear with 1.2 as Squad are keeping current with Unity upgrades.

[azander]

I've run out of ideas. 

My KSP is unplayable except on Windows (I really loathe windows).  Isn't someone going to take a hard, deep, look at this?  I have posed logs, I have tried everything suggested.  At best, I can play 1 time out of every 40 because of this issue.  Often times that 1 will even crash taking the system down with it (hard reboot required).

One of the reasons I tried this game in the first place was because it DID run so well on linux.  Now... Now... I feel like nobody cares about the linux users.

 

I am really hoping that 1.2 fixes it.  Somebody better test it though, because it feels like 1.1.x wasn't tested on many different distributions of Linux.  Remember, unlike Windows, there are many linux flavors and each is slightly different.

 

*one very frustrated gamer*

Az

 

[JoelleEmmily]

@azander not to sound like a CSR, have you tried reinstalling your destro? Worked for me.

[azander]

@joelleEmmily Twice.  Even switched distros once, and had to go back for other reasons.

I don't wish to use Ubuntu, so sent from OpenSuse to Debian, then back.  Debian has similar issues to OpenSuse when it came to this issue.

Az

[JoelleEmmily]

@azander Is KSP throwing something in the syslog? Have you tried running with Ptrace?

[azander]

Nothing in syslog.

Screen outputs always show graphic type errors, or out of memory errors (when using mods).

PLayer.log and KSP.log are always similar to those I posed about 2 pages back.