I’ve gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I’m on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.
That said, yeah… Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it’s actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.
I’ve gotten such symptoms before when running out of RAM - I’m on Arch and never bothered setting anything up for that instance and I’m not sure what’s going on, but I think the system is struggling to recover memory or something before it resorts to killing processes, and would sometimes freeze for a minute like that.
That said, yeah… Kernel modules (which device drivers often are) are allowed to run at a higher level of privilege, with less oversight, more access to hardware and better performance, so if they misuse that privilege they can break things badly. And with proprietary drivers, you have no idea or control of what it’s actually doing, so you can only try to downgrade or wait and hope the company fixes it.