First thread

Previous thread summary

• The Nvidia driver wouldn’t load on the older kernel because of something called a “shim layer” which has to be compiled separately for each kernel using something called dkms. There is apparently a way to do the dkms thing again in a way that would let the Nvidia driver load on the older kernel, but I’m not really feeling up to it. The only things I’m missing out on without the Nvidia driver are RVC and the TV HDMI, anyways.
• I failed to switch to the Nouveau graphics driver because of some error involving dependencies, but was advised against doing this sort of switching around, anyways.
• I managed to successfully locate the failed checksums in debsums, but this ended up being an apparent red herring as the files did not appear to be corrupted but failed the checksums for other reasons. Given which files failed the checksums, the running theory is that Linux Mint maybe ships Ubuntu packages but overwrites specific files to e.g. get rid of material that infringes on Ubuntu’s copyright/trademark (delenda est).
• I’ve been given instructions on how to regenerate initramfs on my most up-to-date kernel any time I want, but am I up to that? …Maybe. After I finish my show on Blorptube later today, maybe. It probably isn’t that risky to regenerate initramfs but it still feels risky.
• People are still saying that my OS is “cooked” and I should probably just do a fresh install, but I’m not giving up the ship just yet. If I am going to go through the rigmarole of reinstalling everything then I also floated the idea of doing this “distro hopping” thing I’ve heard so much about.

Most notable development: My computer’s Internet cut off again last night for the first time since I switched to the older kernel, indicating that my trouble had nothing to do with the kernel version nor with my graphics driver. Just as the last few times this has happened, I got a kernel panic when I tried to shut my computer down after the Internet trouble happened.

I ran sudo journalctl -b -1 -k to get the kernel logs from last night’s incident, and the kernel logs had a lot of talk about things like:

• pcieport device error
• pcieport ACSViol
• pcieport broken device, retraining non-functional downstream link
• PCIe Bus Error: severity=Uncorrectable (Non-Fatal), type=Transaction Layer, (Receiver ID)
• pcieport AER: subordinate device reset failed
• pcieport AER: device recovery failed
• pcieport DPC: containment event, status:0x1f01 source:0x0000
• pcieport DPC: unmasked uncorrectable error detected

I also saw a lot of talk about:

• mt7921e AER: can’t recover (no error_detected callback)
• mt7921e not ready 1023ms after DPC; waiting
• […]
• mt7921e not ready 65535ms after DPC; waiting

The aforementioned messages about PCIe and mt7921e basically repeated in the same order several times, though I haven’t necessarily written them in order here. There was also a singular message amidst the PCIe and mt7921e messages that said workqueue: delayed_fput hogged CPU for >10000us 11 times, consider switching to WQ_UNBOUND

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Some magic words here seem to be AER for “Advanced Error Reporting”, ACSViol for “Access Control Services violation”, and DPC for “Downstream Port Containment”. I’m still not quite sure what the message with the “fput” and “WQ” stuff was about, something about the computer procrastinating on something, I guess…?

PCIe is a “high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers […] commonly used to connect graphics cards, sound cards, Wi-Fi and Ethernet adapters, and storage devices such as solid-state drives and hard disk drives.” — back when I used Windows, this laptop used to have the sound constantly fail, but that doesn’t seem relevant.

mt7921e is apparently a driver for MediaTek’s MT7921 or MT7922 wireless network adapters.

So basically… The wi-fi adapter or its driver is shitting itself for some reason, and the thingamabob that’s supposed to connect my computer’s internal devices to each other notices this, tries to fix the wi-fi thingy, fails, then cuts the device off, which manifests to me as the Internet no longer working. Then the computer rinses and repeats but never gets anywhere, leading it to get stuck during shutdown.

Does that sound like a reasonable explanation? And if it is… Well, what am I supposed to do about it?