Using taskset with a Steam game is pretty easy. I’m not sure if taskset is helping, or if dumb luck was keeping it from locking up on me. We’ll see if the combination keeps working well. I added the taskset back after freezing up several times in a row. I’m currently running with both the AMD microcode update installed, and with taskset -c 0,4 set in my launch options. There were no NVRM errors this time, though! This time, though, it froze up and wouldn’t come back. The game froze up again after another hour or two of playing. Updating the microcode is definitely working better than limiting the game to just two cores using taskset, but it isn’t perfect. I’ll keep playing, and I’ll report back here if this continues to be successful. Installing that and rebooting may be helpful, but I can’t test that. If you’re having trouble and using an Intel processor, there is also an intel-microcode package. If you’re running Ubuntu or Debian, all you have to do is run the command sudo apt-get install amd64-microcode and then reboot. This seems like a much better fix than using taskset. It feels smoother-enabling all eight cores made the game really choppy the last time I tried, and I was able to make it through two checkpoints without any problems. I rebooted, removed all the taskset nonsense from Bioshock Infinite’s launched options, and then played some Bioshock. I was too busy to reboot last night, but I gave it a shot today. This package puts CPU microcode patches into your initrd, and these are loaded into the CPU on boot. I installed the amd64-microcode Ubuntu package last night. I haven’t crashed again, but I haven’t played much more yet, either. My frame rates are a little lower, but the game is definitely playable. I ended up limiting the game to two cores, and this seems to be working quite well. I tried using taskset to limit the game to just one core, but the intro videos couldn’t even play smoothly. The consensus seemed to be that using taskset to limit Bioshock Infinite to fewer cores either completely works around the problem, or at least reduces the incidence of crashing quite significantly. I found a Steam forum post with a considerable number of people in the same boat. This was enough of a lead to help narrow my search considerably. My FX-8350 is a Piledriver CPU, and I’ve found forum responses from people with Bulldozer and Phenom chips. They all had various multicore AMD processors. In the comments on one of the handful of Bioshock Infinite posts, there were three people with a similar problem replying to one another. I did get a small clue while browsing r/linuxgaming on Reddit. The Internet wasn’t terribly insightful this time. I end up having to kill the bioshock.i386 process. When it freezes up like this, the video stops but the music just keeps on playing. No matter what I did at this point, I was consistently freezing up near the start of the first gun battle. I made it far enough to pick up a gun, then the game froze up again. I probably played that time for nearly an hour. One red herring I encountered was when I switched from my custom 3.19-pf2 kernel to the stock Ubuntu kernel. I believe I made it off the rowboat on my third attempt, but I didn’t get much farther than that. I figured that it might have been a fluke, so I tried again. Things went just fine for a while, but the game froze up on me before even getting out of the rowboat. I had to wait almost an hour for the 42-GB game to download. I decided to grab the “Season Pass Bundle” and give the game a try. Not only was it available for Linux, but it was also 75% off. I looked at the list, and there was Bioshock Infinite. I didn’t notice it until a few days ago when Steam popped up a message telling me that 2K Games was having a big sale. I’m late to the “Bioshock Infinite is now available on Linux” party.
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