u/gerowen

I'm making this post not to ask for help, but to share information. I want to preface this post by saying that this issue is not with Jellyfin, but Jellyfin is what became affected for me, so I decided this was probably the best subreddit to share it, though this issue could probably also affect Plex, Emby or any other service that uses GPU transcoding.

I'm running Jellyfin on a headless Debian stable install, but with the newer backports kernel on an x86-64 machine, which currently gets me kernel version 7.1.

Over the last few weeks my Jellyfin service would randomly freeze. Other services seemed unaffected most of the time. Jellyfin apps would show up as signed out, and if you manually signed in, you could, but nothing would play. Restarting the Jellyfin service, if the command even executed successfully instead of hanging, wouldn't fix the issue. Another symptom I noticed when the issue would arise is that the "htop" command wouldn't run properly; I would just get a blank screen. btop and top would work fine, but not htop.

I'm far from an expert in debugging this kind of problem, and it's entirely possible this is all wildly inaccurate since I used an LLM to help me, though I did try to verify its claims with other sources to the best of my ability. Anyway, I exported some log files and went back and forth with both a local AI and Brave.ai to help me sift thru them, while describing the issue, to try and figure out what is going on, and apparently there is a known regression in kernel 7.1, and certain versions of kernel 6.x, in the way memory translations are handled during GPU operations. This can trigger crashes in the amdgpu driver, which can cause instability in the kernel's memory subsystem, or just straight up crashes/hangs (which I also had happen once or twice) with some AMD GPUs when they perform certain operations, like hardware transcoding.

This issue didn't exist a few months ago and only recently started cropping up, coincidentally, around the time I upgraded to kernel 7.1.

The resolution, for now, seems to be to either upgrade/downgrade to an unaffected kernel version, or to disable HMM and/or IOMMU using kernel arguments at boot. I added amd_iommu=off and iommu=off to my command line arguments in grub to accomplish this.

I also found this post of someone else having driver crashes on AMD GPUs using kernel 7.1.

https://etbe.coker.com.au/2026/08/15/amd-video-llms-debian-kernels/

It has been about 48 hours, and so far I haven't had any issues, despite multiple hardware transcoding sessions within Jellyfin during that time. If I do run into anything new, I'll update or comment on this post. I just wanted to put this out there into the ether so everyone can benefit, or comment.

Also, I did run memtest on my system to verify that the system RAM wasn't faulty and everything checked out. I also performed SMART tests on all my storage media, and it all checks out fine too.

The biggest reason I got the remaster is because I game on PC and I wanted native controller support without having to manually set everything up with Steam input, use the PS5 touchpad as a mouse to navigate menus, etc. But as a side benefit, the remaster looks really good. It's not perfect, for some reason when it rains out in the open world the framerate takes a noticeable hit even with hardware ray tracing disabled, and the screen space reflections seem to have a very generous border around their edges when you're panning your view across large bodies of water, but overall it just looks amazing, enough that, to me, it actually helps with immersion. Honestly, I wouldn't mind if they did this to Skyrim and maybe made it a bit less "gray" everywhere. I understand Skyrim is the frozen north kind of environment, but it still feels kinda flat and drab after a while.

Dude followed me into Oblivion. I hadn't seen him in quite a while because I had been riding around on my horse, when just as I was entering the main spire of this particular Oblivion portal this dude just runs up behind me with a torch in his hand and a smile on his face. Followed me all the way to the end. Just wish he was a little more useful. I don't mind him not fighting, but would be nice if he could carry some stuff.

Doing a play thru and just killed Flemeth. I never gave these robes much thought before but noticed some items have hidden effects or lore you only discover by "inspecting" them. These are apparently special robes specifically designed to be a "gift" Flemeth feigns to give her daughters, that in actuality weaken their willpower and make it easier for her to posses them. This is what Morrigan would have received as a welcome home gift after our journey.

You can climb ladders!

On a serious note though, this mod is really impressive. It's got loads of fully voiced characters, custom items, a whole new race of people, new creatures, etc. It's wild how much work was put into this. They even went so far as to rename items in the world to fit with the British English setting instead of American English; cash registers are now "till", etc.

I got it thru GoG and just applied it to my also GoG purchased copy of Fallout 4 to avoid messing with my Fallout 4 save data on Steam, and I've really enjoyed myself so far.

After years I finally understand how lock picking works in Oblivion. Oblivion Remasteted has an in game guide of sorts that explains all the in game mechanics complete with video demos. Apparently the upward movement speed of a tumbler indicates whether it will set for you. So if it's moving fast, just let it come down and try again until you get the slowest one.

I first played this game when it came out on PS3, and now I can actually pick locks, 🙂

Someone mentioned this on here the other day so I went poking around. Here's the short version of how to get into that cave you can see from the Altus Plateau that is JUST out of reach. This is the most random secret.

Longer YouTube version is at: https://youtu.be/IVl2nVJV-80

I've seen more than one post or comment about fighting Malenia, and her waterfoul attack almost inevitably comes up and I end up trying to describe in words how I usually avoid most of the damage from it, as somebody who is in their late 30s whose reaction time isn't what it was 20 years ago. Last night I finally got back to her in my NG+ play-thru and figured I'd pull a clip out of the background recording to demonstrate.

If you notice her setting up really quickly and you're already at a medium-ish distance, you can outrun the first phase of it (not the rest though), but when I realized what she was doing I knew there was no way I was going to get far enough away so I just decided to eat phase 1 with my shield. If you try and fail to outrun phase 1 it's really hard to recover and she'll just eat you alive, so if you have any doubts at all about whether you've got time to get probably 1/4-1/3 the width of the arena away from her, then don't even try because she'll just hit you in the back. After the first volley of attacks though, no matter how far away you are, she will just zoom across the arena to hit you, at least that's what she has done to me when I've tried it while helping other players, so your options are to either eat it with a shield and accept the fact she's gonna get healed, or roll dodge thru it. You can also hear after my 2nd dodge that she pegs my shield once; I keep my shield button held down the entire time I'm dodging so that if she happens to hit me, the shield stops it.

There were messages all over the floor from other players saying things like, "Don't you dare!", and the guy in the corner was telling me, "You'll never stop him", which I was guessing referred to this dragon skeleton. But all it did was move around and then fall apart. I was just wondering if this was normal, or if it was supposed to be some kind of boss fight.

I'm not sure how I feel about fighting Vendrick. Everyone told me that's what I needed to do to succeed him and take the throne, but fighting him in this state almost feels like when you fight the wolf in the graveyard in DS1. It's almost pathetic to see him in this state, knowing what he was like before (from the memory). I guess it kind of be seen as a mercy to put him out of his misery.

This is my fight against the Guardian Dragon. I remembered in DS1 you could cut off the tails of bosses like the gargoyles, Seath, etc. and get special weapons, so part way thru this fight I decided to try that with this guy and see if I got anything. Sadly all it accomplished, I think, was removing his ability to do the tail swipe.

I'm the same guy that has posted a few other "New Player Updates" lately and just wanted to let y'all know I finished the main game last night. I've still got the DLC and some other things I want to explore, but Aldia is down. He took me two attempts because I just wasn't paying attention since the game immediately rolls into his fight from the Nashandra fight, and I stood in fire too long.

I may make a few other posts with some other clips or screenshots from the past couple of days.

I've thoroughly enjoyed the game and am looking forward to DS3 once I finish all the DLC and such.

Lucatiel...

Of all the characters I've met thus far, Lucatiel is probably my favorite, but it's getting to a point where I feel like she's losing her grip on herself and might attack me later.

Her fear of going hollow, the way she describes it, reminds me a lot of dementia, which is something that scares the absolute crap out of me. Having had relatives and known people who had dementia, it can be terrifying for them because they really don't understand what's happening, and really don't remember the people in their lives. Dying is bad enough, but to forget who you are? My wife is the most important person in my life, I love her more than anything, and the thought of forgetting who she is terrifies me more than death itself; of all the things that might happen to me as I age, I hope dementia isn't one of them.

So I really sympathize with her fear of losing her sense of self, and listening to her work thru and experience her decline in real time, watching her realize what's happening, it's sad.

This was actually a couple of days ago, but someone asked me to post more videos of my first play-thru of the game that I'm still working on, so I thought I'd share this one. I'm using a sword in this fight because I had gone so long between resting at a bonfire my axe's durability got danger-low, so I switched to a +4 straight sword I put a fire enchantment on as a backup weapon.

This whole area was really cool to explore honestly. The way the spiders flee from light, and the way it achieves real time shadows and lighting from the braziers and torches, even down to casting the correct shaped shadow depending on what weapon you're holding, (without ray tracing, btw) made all these dark areas look so cool.

I felt like I cheesed this boss a little or something, and maybe this goes back to what I said in my post about the OIK that the bosses sometimes seem easy compared to just navigating the normal enemies throughout the world. Maybe the NPC summon changed how the fight worked, but it seemed like she just stared me down the whole time and didn't do a whole lot except sit there and let me smack her in the face.

This did bring up some lore questions though. This boss's name is "The Duke's Dear Freja", and right after this fight, you find "The Duke" has gone hollow and is just hanging out in his chambers. Is this spider boss a pet he raised, or is it some"one" he once loved turned into a giant spider?