Comment 14 for bug 1970072

I've already disabled the .timer units for the Pomodoro sounds.

I'll investigate the kernel angle.

Here's an odd angle: Could this be a Vulkan issue? I picked up on a thread that pre-Haswell GPUs and integrated CPUs may have trouble implementing Vulkan. Graphics are discrete but my CPU is a Xeon E5-2609v2 (Ivy Bridge). The original manifestation of the GUI hang was xorg locking up one of my CPU cores. That was with driver 390, and the original thread was being addressed at VMware, with the fix being disable or reconfigure Vulkan or its timeout. See https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/VM-Crash-16-2-1-build-18811642/m-p/2906574/emcs_t/S2h8ZW1haWx8dG9waWNfc3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ufEwySlVMWUVLSzRSU0VNfDI5MDY1NzR8U1VCU0NSSVBUSU9OU3xoSw#M175498

The CPU lockup was seen in the Nvidia forums as a matter of CPU offload that shouldn't have happened (overaggressive power management couldn't up-cycle the GPU before a rendering timeout offloaded to the CPU). Maybe the CPU lockup in my case wasn't because of the offload per se, but that the CPU's architecture didn't fully support the Vulkan-mode rendering being offloaded to it.

While this was being run down, my PSU failed, taking my HDDs with it (yay backups!). Whereas driver 390 was all that could get 20.04 running in 2020, driver 470 worked better with 20.04.4 last month and the CPU lockups ceased, if not the GUI freezes. Not a surprise that CPU offloading was better handled in 470 two years later, but perhaps Vulkan is still baked into the pie and my CPU's response to it is still throwing things off.

I'll note there are null characters being thrown about, and random division errors, not to mention occasional invalid packets. These suggest a wrench still in the works. Thoughts?