Strange error message "GPU process isn't useable"

balenaEtcher
1

Hi. I’m new to this forum. I’m running Gentoo Linux on a Dell XPS8930. I installed balenaEtcher-1.5.120-x64.AppImage on a different system (Ubuntu?) a long time ago, and just copied that file into my Gentoo system. It has always worked flawlessly. Today it dies with this message:

[3194:0427/115453.131193:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(415)] GPU process isn’t usable. Goodbye.

I imagine this may have somethig to do with the way I have configured the Linux kernel. I recently went to a lot of trouble to strip all the unnecessary bits out, and build all the hardware functionality I truly need into a monolithic kernel (no initramfs). I don’t run Etcher very often, and I have other versions of Linux installed on my hard disk (Artix, Endeavour, Manjaro, Ubuntu). So I can still use Etcher, by booting into one of those systems. But I’d like to get it working on Gentoo again.

Any suggestions will be helpful. Thanks!

2

I am also getting this using the Appimage file of version 1.7.9 on kubuntu 22.04

mesa: for the --simplifycfg-sink-common option: may only occur zero or one times!
mesa: for the --global-isel-abort option: may only occur zero or one times!
mesa: for the --amdgpu-atomic-optimizations option: may only occur zero or one times!
[Axios v1.7.9] Transitional option ‘clarifyTimeoutError’ has been deprecated since v1.0.0 and will be removed in the near future
[Axios v1.7.9] Transitional option ‘forcedJSONParsing’ has been deprecated since v1.0.0 and will be removed in the near future
[Axios v1.7.9] Transitional option ‘silentJSONParsing’ has been deprecated since v1.0.0 and will be removed in the near future
[50031:0428/025939.088466:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(415)] GPU process isn’t usable. Goodbye.
/tmp/.mount_balena1xtnE9/balena-etcher-electron: line 10: 50031 Trace/breakpoint trap “${script_dir}”/balena-etcher-electron.bin “$@”

3

Just for grins, I updated to the latest version of Balena Etcher (1.7.9-x64). Now my error messages look just like Bevil’s, sans the “mesa” stuff.

[Axios v1.7.9] Transitional option ‘clarifyTimeoutError’ has been deprecated since v1.0.0 and will be removed in the near future
[Axios v1.7.9] Transitional option ‘forcedJSONParsing’ has been deprecated since v1.0.0 and will be removed in the near future
[Axios v1.7.9] Transitional option ‘silentJSONParsing’ has been deprecated since v1.0.0 and will be removed in the near future
[23163:0505/114112.010250:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(415)] GPU process isn’t usable. Goodbye.
/tmp/.mount_balenaqtd7Np/balena-etcher-electron: line 10: 23163 Trace/breakpoint trap “${script_dir}”/balena-etcher-electron.bin “$@”

4

I had this issue with balenaEtcher and Ubuntu 22.04 AFTER installing a new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card. The fix for me was to add “–disable-gpu-sandbox” to the end of the line when running the executable, or add it to the end of the Exec line in the .desktop file, e.g:
Exec=~/Applications/balenaEtcher-1.7.9-x64.AppImage --disable-gpu-sandbox

5

Thanks, Brewer. That fixed it for me. Is there a list of runtime options available somewhere?

6

Hi, it looks like you might not be able to use Etcher’s GUI with your system. There isn’t an official CLI tool yet, but you could try calling etcher’s SDK directly.

  1. clone GitHub - balena-io-modules/etcher-sdk
  2. Install node if you haven’t already
  3. npm i in the etcher-sdk directory
  4. cd examples
  5. npm i -g ts-node
  6. ts-node ./multi-destination.ts /path/to/source /path/to/destination/disk

Replace /path/to/destination/disk with your disk, e.g. /dev/sda and /path/to/source with your disk image, e.g. ~/Downloads/balenaos.img