Johnny Matthews | Fix AMD crash on all Linux kernels

There’s a super annoying, hard to find, bug in AMD drivers that causes my specific chipset (Ryzen 9 8945HS) to crash on any Linux kernel. I was able to track down the exact parameters one needs to give to Linux to stop this crash. Kinda annoying, but at least I found it! This was written on 19th of March 2026.

The fix requires changing a kernel parameter, so this fix is distro independent. However, the methods to apply the fix might differ from distro to distro. Generally speaking though, you need to:

  1. Edit your grub file, usually found at /etc/default/grub.
  2. Find GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, or add it if it’s not in the file.
  3. Add this parameter:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10"
  1. Save the file.
  2. Regenerate the GRUB config:
sudo update-grub
  1. Dead easy.

No GRUB?

This process differs slightly on distros that don’t use GRUB, or use a different config structure. For example, on systemd-boot (sometimes found in Arch and Fedora setups) you need to edit a .conf file in /boot/loader/entries/ instead.

On NixOS you just need to set it within the boot.kernelParams object in your configuration. In my NixOS config, that section looks like:

# ==========================================================================
# BOOT & KERNEL
# ==========================================================================
  boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = false;
  boot.loader.grub = {
    enable = true;
    device = "nodev";
    efiSupport = true;
    efiInstallAsRemovable = true;
  };
  boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = false;
  boot.kernelParams = [ "amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10" ];
  boot.resumeDevice = "/dev/disk/by-label/swap";