Today, I decided to take a break from starting on this next bullet in the OctoberPeaks release plan and clear my head with a game. I figured I had been meaning to get back to The Long Dark, so I gave that a shot.

After the usual frustration of Steam's forced updates (it updated the game twice while trying to start), it started with absolutely terrible performance. As in, takes a full minute to fade in the main menu kind of bad (about 2-3 seconds per frame).

At first, I figured that this must have been a problem caused by the updates, since I recall having been able to play it a few months ago, without issue. Plus, I verified that Project Zomboid seemed fine and OctoberPeaks was fine, so it wasn't anything too bad. Of course, those games have less taxing graphics demands than most.

Well, digging through glxinfo, I found that my graphics driver was now the "Intel" one, meaning that it was using the integrated graphics. I have no idea when this changed, but it seems to have been within the past few months, probably as a result of some system update (I rarely run the updates since they are the most likely way something will break).

Digging further, it looks like I didn't even have the Nvidia driver for the dedicated graphics hardware. I suspect that the previous update didn't update the graphics driver for some non-obvious reason and defaulted to the Intel driver. I have no idea when or why this happened.

Well, I tried running another update but it didn't fix it. So, I tried running the "ubuntu-drivers" command to install the recommended closed-source driver for the hardware. This downloaded lots of stuff and rebuilt the core boot components.

I tried booting this new configuration and it hung part-way through start-up. So, I guess something is broken. Luckily, GRUB came to my rescue and I was able to mess with the kernel command-line. However, the previous trick which had worked (when I first set up this system, I needed to fiddle with the command-line to get this driver to work), now didn't seem to do anything. At least I was able to use GRUB to let me boot the previous configuration, and that was still working fine (but still with Intel, obviously).

So, after some manual removal of the broken kernel and some forced re-installation of the broken version, my system is back up and working on the latest, but still stuck with Intel.

I suspect that the problem is not with the command-line, but is related to something which went wrong when rebuilding kernel modules with the new driver (as I couldn't manually load normal modules in the recovery mode when in the broken state).

I will need to give this another shot but when I feel as though I have more time to dig into it since I do still want to fix this. As for now, at least the system is defaulting to a new kernel which is working in a reasonable state, if not optimal.

Still, I wish I knew why the driver broke in the first place,
Jeff.