Sunshine hangs silently on startup with AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (Linux Mint 22.3)

[penwick0]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Is your issue described in the documentation?

• I have read the documentation

Is your issue present in the latest beta/pre-release?

This issue is present in the latest pre-release

Describe the Bug

Sunshine hangs indefinitely upon startup without producing any logs or console output. The application process starts but immediately becomes unresponsive during the hardware probing/initialisation phase. This occurs even when using ⁠--debug⁠ or forcing minimal configuration.

Expected Behavior

Sunshine should initialise and begin listening on the configured ports.

Actual Behavior:
The process hangs silently. The system remains responsive, but the Sunshine process does not proceed past initialisation.

Additional Context

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Install Sunshine via .dev/flatpak.
2. Run ⁠/usr/bin/sunshine --debug⁠ (or start the systemd service).
3. The process hangs immediately. No output is printed to the console.
4. systemctl -status shows the service is running, but the web ui is not accessible.
5. ⁠dmesg⁠ shows ⁠amdgpu⁠ initialised correctly at boot, but Sunshine fails to initialise the hardware encoder interface.

Troubleshooting Performed:

• Kernel: Tested on stock kernel (6.17) and 6.8.0; both show the same hang.

• Config: Tried forcing ⁠capture = x11⁠ and ⁠encoder = software⁠ in ⁠sunshine.conf⁠.

• Permissions: Verified group memberships and tried ⁠sudo⁠.

• Logs: ⁠dmesg⁠ confirms GPU is healthy and initialized at boot, though shows some ⁠UFW BLOCK⁠ logs due to firewall restrictions (rules were subsequently added to allow Sunshine ports).

• Library: Reinstalled ⁠libX11-6⁠ and ⁠libX11-xcb1⁠ due to unrelated segfaults seen in ⁠dmesg⁠ for other applications, but this did not resolve the Sunshine hang.

• Hardware: Confirmed the same GPU works perfectly with Sunshine on a dual-booted Windows 10 installation, suggesting this is a Linux-specific driver/initialization conflict with the RX 5700 XT.

The process appears to deadlock during GPU capability probing. Any assistance in identifying why the hardware interface hangs for this specific Navi-series card on the current Ubuntu/Mint 24.04 base would be appreciated.

Host Operating System

Linux

Operating System Version

Linux Mint 22.3

Architecture

amd64/x86_64

Package

Linux - deb

GPU Type

AMD

GPU Model

Radeon RX 5700 XT

GPU Driver/Mesa Version

Mesa Gallium 25.2.8-0ubuntu0.24.04.1

Capture Method

KMS (Linux)

Apps

Log output

Online logs

No response

[ReenigneArcher]

How about including Sunshine logs?

[penwick0]

How about including Sunshine logs?

I mentioned above that sunshine does not produce any logs. The logs file is completely empty.

[ReenigneArcher]

Sunshine logs information before any probing even happens though... maybe you have a permissions issue if it can't write the log file.

[Kishi85]

Do you get any output with journalctl --user -u app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service -b 0 or when running sunshine (or /usr/bin/sunshine) directly in a terminal? Via either of those you should get the necessary log as well.

If you don't get log output running the binary directly then something is likely broken on your system not allowing to run the sunshine binary at all. You can try the Flatpak or AppImage version in this case and see if it's just the .deb Installation being broken or if it's a general problem.

[Natanande]

I have this exact issue. I thought I was going crazy because I couldn't find anyone else with the same problem.
No logs. I hangs when running the binary directly as well. I can run "sunshine --help" but not "sunshine --version".
I have an AMD RX 9060 XT, so maybe this is an AMD issue?

I run Bazzite. I think the issue started around January (sorry don't have exact version). I've tried Flatpak, rpm-ostree layering, brew. Same result for everything. As I said, no out put when running binary directly in terminal except with --help.

When running with systemctl service, the only logs from journalctl I get is this:

Jun 23 16:42:12 localhost-live systemd[2396]: Started app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service - Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight.
Jun 23 16:50:44 localhost-live systemd[2396]: Stopping app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service - Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight...

[Kishi85]

Jun 23 16:42:12 localhost-live systemd[2396]: Started app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service - Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight.
Jun 23 16:50:44 localhost-live systemd[2396]: Stopping app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service - Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight...

Since this log is not really helping could you provide the full output of systemctl --user status app-dev.lizardbyte.app.Sunshine.service as well? Maybe we'll see an exit code or some other error indicator in there.