Linux Kernel 6.16.3 delaying my life

It seems to me it was only a week, maybe two, ago that Linux kernel 6.16.2 was released, and much to my surprised, 6.16.3 was released Friday or Saturday, not really sure and too lazy to check release dates. I had updated to 6.16.2 and noticed possible performance degredation in The First descendant. I was used to seeing 170~fps and on occasion it’d drop down as low as 100FPS, but it was extremely rare to see it below 90fps. After upgrading to 6.16.2 I noticed it was typically around 150-160fps with lows down around 90 being kind of common. Using FSR and framgen as one does with a UE5 game just to have playable FPS anything below 100 I feel the input lag of FSR 3 struggling to keep up with the demands of the wonderfully optimized engine that is UE5.1.

Fast forward to last night, I decided, it’s Saturday, if I blow things up I’ve got all Sunday to get it back up and running before work on Monday. Queue upgrade!, I was semi-smart and at some point set up timeshift so I made sure there was a checkpoint before I performed the upgrade. Apdatifier is a KDE plugin I use, shoutout to DarkXero and XeroLinux.xyz for all his help and amazing distro that I have been running since February!

Rebooted after the upgrade and all was good, so it seemed, everything worked, etc. I was excited to see if the performance issues were resolved in TFD since it’s the game I tend to play the most when I’m bored.

As you can see from the clip below, it did not go well..

I ended up using timeshift and rolling back to my checkpoint before the upgrade.., and broke grub all to pieces, thankfully the XeroLinux Blog has a guide even my dumb ass can follow to reinstall/restore grub once my idiot ass breaks it. After a brief scare that my thumb drive with my XeroKDE ISO was trashed I was able to power the system completely off, boot it up to the boot menu and then boot into the Live Envrionment, chroot, reinstall grumb, and then boot back into the system as normal. I have a dedicated nvme drive just for my /home partition so data loss wasn’t a big concern, but all the little things I installed, tweaks for thinks like OpenRGB, etc would all need to be manually redone so a reinstall wasn’t on my list of things I wanted to do today.