This year I replaced my work computer with a AMD Ryzen 7 8700G running Debian 12.

This was mostly ok, but I was getting the most random and rare hard lockups. I was super confused and frustrated as all my burn in tests came back clean with no issues. I even tried a short stint on Ubuntu 24.10 to see it it would help, but it still happened. Then I tried a GPU benchmarking tool and it hard locked my computer every time it tried to load. Since this was a work computer I hardly ever really engaged the GPU seriously. Turns out the GPU was fine, but the drivers were not.

Below is what I did to fix it, as a reference to myself and others. These are my instructions for Debian 12, adapted from some advice I was linked to from the Linux Mint forum and instruction from the Debian Forum and Wiki.

[!WARNING] This is a rando on the internet advising you to install a bleeding edge kernel, the latest hotness mesa, and the latest AMD kernel drivers from the HEAD of the git repo.

This hasn’t bit me in the ass yet, but it may blow up your use case.

Set up Debian 12’s Bookworm Backports

echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
sudo apt update

Backport Kernel, AMD, & Mesa

This installed the linux kernel 6.11 at the time of this article.

sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports linux-image-amd64 linux-headers-amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri libglx-mesa0 mesa-vulkan-drivers libglu1-mesa libglu1-mesa-dev

Update the AMD Drivers from the Kernel’s Main Branch

Download the linux-firmware-main.tar.gz into ~/Downloads from the linux firmware git page.

cd ~/Downloads
tar -xzf linux-firmware-main.tar.gz
sudo cp --update ~/Downloads/linux-firmware-main/amdgpu/* /lib/firmware/amdgpu/
sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

This will generate a pile of warnings about missing files, but none of them caused any issues for me.

Reboot and Pray

sudo systemctl reboot