There's a game that, while I will admit that I don't really have an interest in playing, isn't working properly because it's trying to default to a GPU driver that isn't even loaded ( and possibly not even installed). The game is called Zbridge and it's standalone app is only distributed through Flathub. For some reason, it's trying to default to using "iris" even though the only GPU driver that's loaded is "i915". I have confirmed this with this:
j@j-Latitude-E7470:~$ lspci -k -s 2
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] (rev 07)
DeviceName: Onboard IGD
Subsystem: Dell Latitude E7470
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915
But the game, on top of giving some other errors I've found to be trivial, still tries to load iris by default for some reason:
j@j-Latitude-E7470:~$ flatpak run club.zbridge.zbridge
[2:1229/172053.425891:ERROR:bus.cc(407)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: 17:20:55.221: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
[2:1229/172056.788306:ERROR:bus.cc(407)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
[2:1229/172056.788423:ERROR:bus.cc(407)] Failed to connect to the bus: Failed to connect to socket /run/dbus/system_bus_socket: No such file or directory
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
glx: failed to create dri3 screen
failed to load driver: iris
[41:1229/172103.010356:ERROR:viz_main_impl.cc(196)] Exiting GPU process due to errors during initialization
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172118.159439:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172133.299896:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172148.425964:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172203.465700:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172218.491001:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
MESA: error: Failed to query drm device.
[2:1229/172233.517237:ERROR:gpu_process_host.cc(989)] GPU process exited unexpectedly: exit_code=512
[2:1229/172233.517295:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(448)] GPU process isn't usable. Goodbye.
I have found a temporary solution by running export MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=i915 but as far as I can tell, I shouldn't have to do this because it should just be defaulting to the driver that's already loaded. If this is an issue with the app itself, I am going to submit a bug report but I want to make sure this issue isn't on my end before submitting one.
After trying vmtouch, it only seems to be partially helping. I'm not sure if I'm just using it incorrectly or not but if I remove the files from RAM and then use vmtouch to add them back in, the hitching issues are still partially there.
To fully explain what my issue is, I currently using the Linux version of the Cyber Lancer demo from Itchio as it's small enough to fit onto my 128 MB SD card, which is very slow. I can easily run the game from other storage devices that have much higher read speeds but I want to get the most out of my older and slower storage devices. What's happening is when the game first loads when it's files aren't stored in RAM, is the game essentially freezes for a split second every time it has to load an asset that wasn't previously loaded.
vmtouch isn't making the hitching go away, it just making it load a little faster. This does mean that it'll help but if you're aware of a better solution, I can try that out as well.