Davinci Resolve Studio on Tumbleweed freezes when opening projects

[ikanotheokara]

I feel like I’m so close to getting this working, yet stumbling at the last hurdle.

After a few weeks of trying different suggestions gleaned from a combination of this forum, Reddit and a few blogs, I have finally managed to get Davinci Resolve Studio 20.3.2 to install, start and recognize my Radeon 6700XT. Unfortunately, if I try to open a project, it will show the loading dialog and then freeze, becoming completely unresponsive.

It would seem that Resolve recognizes that the GPU is installed, but fails to actually initialize it. A glance at the logs reveals exceptions like these occurring at start time:

x7efa14de3000 | GPU.MultiBoardMgr    | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,863 | Let There Be OpenCL Light!
0x7efa14de3000 | GPU.MultiBoardMgr    | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,864 | Initializing OpenCL board manager for Main Display GPU gpu:e6848fe8.a0aa77a0.
0x7efa135e0000 | UI.GLContext         | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,864 | Creating shared OpenGL context for this thread (2 total).
0x7efbe90c2000 | Main                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,864 | Show splash screen message: Initializing system components
0x7efbe90c2000 | Main                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,865 | Show splash screen message: Loading video codecs
0x7efbe90c2000 | Main                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,866 | Show splash screen message: Loading video plugins
0x7efbe90c2000 | Main                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,866 | Show splash screen message: Loading Fairlight Engine
0x7efa135e0000 | DVIP                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,868 | Created OpenCL context for devices gpu:e6848fe8.a0aa77a0
0x7efa893eb000 | IO                   | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,870 | IO codec initialization completed in 4 ms.
0x7efa135e0000 | DVIP                 | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,870 | Failed to create OpenCL context:

DVIP Exception: OpenCL Context Manager failed to create context.
 - API: OpenCL
 - Call stack:
   1   resolve                                 0x9b78dc2 
   2   resolve                                 0x9bf6f1a 
   3   resolve                                 0x9bfae4c 
   4   resolve                                 0x7b0cb6a 
   5   resolve                                 0x7b0f33b 
   6   resolve                                 0x7b0f89a 
   7   resolve                                 0x7b15bbf 
   8   libc.so.6                          0x7efbdb49bdf1 
   9   libc.so.6                          0x7efbdb520c8c 

0x7efa135e0000 | GPU.SingleBoardMgr   | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,870 | Failed to initialize OpenCL board manager for "AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT" (gpu:e6848fe8.a0aa77a0): Failed to initialize OpenCL context
0x7efa14de3000 | GPU.SingleBoardMgr   | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,870 | Failed to initialize SingleBoardManager.
0x7efa14de3000 | GPU.MultiBoardMgr    | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:08,870 | Failed to initialize board manager for gpu:e6848fe8.a0aa77a0.
0x7efa4d9ff000 | Fusion               | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,282 | 371 templates scanned in 0.12 secs
0x7efbe90c2000 | Fairlight            | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,594 | 00.00.00.725(002): Running Fairlight (ce68f8faf62cda8549775b45e923d35d7bc7106a)
0x7efbe90c2000 | FairlightLoader      | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,594 | Fairlight lib initialized in 727 ms.
0x7efa89bec000 | UI.GLContext         | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,594 | Creating shared OpenGL context for this thread (3 total).
0x7efa89bec000 | DVIP                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,656 | Re-using OpenCL context for devices gpu:e6848fe8.a0aa77a0
0x7efa89bec000 | DVIP                 | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,658 | Failed to create OpenCL context:

DVIP Exception: OpenCL Context Manager failed to create context.
 - API: OpenCL
 - Call stack:
   1   resolve                                 0x9b78dc2 
   2   resolve                                 0x9bf6f1a 
   3   resolve                                 0x9bfae4c 
   4   resolve                                 0x9bbcb82 
   5   resolve                                 0x9bbcdbf 
   6   resolve                                 0x38a2806 
   7   resolve                                 0x38a609f 
   8   libc.so.6                          0x7efbdb49bdf1 
   9   libc.so.6                          0x7efbdb520c8c 

0x7efa89bec000 | UI.GLIO              | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,658 | MainPlayer: Failed to create DVIP context.
0x7efbe90c2000 | UI.GLIO              | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,658 | MainPlayer: Failed to initialize worker thread.
0x7ef9af69a000 | UI.GLContext         | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,658 | Creating shared OpenGL context for this thread (4 total).
0x7ef9af69a000 | DVIP                 | INFO  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,660 | Re-using OpenCL context for devices gpu:e6848fe8.a0aa77a0
0x7ef9af69a000 | DVIP                 | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,661 | Failed to create OpenCL context:

DVIP Exception: OpenCL Context Manager failed to create context.
 - API: OpenCL
 - Call stack:
   1   resolve                                 0x9b78dc2 
   2   resolve                                 0x9bf6f1a 
   3   resolve                                 0x9bfae4c 
   4   resolve                                 0x9bbcb82 
   5   resolve                                 0x9bbcdbf 
   6   resolve                                 0x38bb77c 
   7   resolve                                 0x38c414f 
   8   libc.so.6                          0x7efbdb49bdf1 
   9   libc.so.6                          0x7efbdb520c8c 

0x7ef9af69a000 | UI.Scopes            | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,661 | Failed to create DVIP context.
0x7efbe90c2000 | UI.Scopes            | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,661 | Failed to initialize worker thread.
0x7efbe90c2000 | Main                 | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,661 | Remote monitor is not supported.
0x7efbe90c2000 | Main                 | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,661 | Failed to initialize OpenGL texture pool, no valid contexts available.
0x7ef9a7b27000 | SyManager            | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,665 | Failed to connect to panel socket
0x7ef9a7b27000 | SyManager            | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,665 | DRIVER: open /var/tmp/davinci_socket failed
0x7efbe90c2000 | UI                   | WARN  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,676 | Text default font [Open Sans] is not available in font database.
0x7ef9a7326000 | SyManager            | WARN  | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,679 | Keyboard identifiers mismatch 1133 45093
0x7ef9a7326000 | SyManager            | ERROR | 2026-02-28 17:10:09,679 | s_PreCheckLinux failed.

Full log available here.

Oddly enough it seems to successfully one OpenCL context but fails to create a second? I’m afraid I’m way out of my depth here so I cannot even begun to understand what is going wrong.

Resolve Studio is installed using Davinci’s official Linux installer, with a few tweaks as recommended by other users, namely:

1. Using “SKIP_PACKAGE_CHECK=1” to get around the installer not being able to detect “libapr1” package on the system.
2. Removing glib libraries installed by Resolve which cause conflicts.

I’m using ROCm packages provided by this repository :
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science:/GPU:/ROCm/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/
…and for what it’s worth, Blender (which also uses ROCm) seems to have no trouble both recognizing and using my GPU.

I’ve read that a similar bug can occur in multigpu systems, namely laptops that have both dGPU and iGPU because Resolve tries to use the wrong GPU. But I’m on a desktop so I wouldn’t think it would be a problem. Besides, the logs show that Resolve is trying to initialize the right GPU.

Has anybody experienced anything like this and resolved it? I feel like I’ve come so far that I don’t want to give up now!

[ikanotheokara]

Well, after another day and another deep dive, I have become less hopeful.

It would seem that the 6000 series doesn’t really handle OpenCL well. I thought this page indicated that RDNA2 was supported, but other pages like this one for the latest version of ROCm provided by the repository indicate otherwise. I was sure I had seen a post somewhere of someone getting 6000 series to work with ROCm under Tumbleweed…

I had really hoped I could use my Tumbleweed desktop for video editing projects, but it looks like I might have to use my Win11 notebook for that and just pray the situation improves.

[ikanotheokara]

There doesn’t seem to be much interest in this topic, but I’ll keep sharing my experience in the off chance it helps someone else in the future.

Rambling and Introspection

I’ll be the first to gladly admit that the details of the likes of OpenCL, HIP, ROCm and so on are all very new to me and I’m only just managing to wrap my head around them. The last time I main drove a Linux desktop was over 20 years ago when I pretty much only cared about GPU support for playing games.

It’s been a learning experience, for sure. Blender gave me false hope because I mistakenly assumed that HIP was related to (or some kind of implementation of) OpenCL. I know, RTFM, but now I know that they are completely different APIs. Blender uses HIP for GPU processing, while Resolve, Digikam and Darktable all use OpenCL.

So the fact that Blender was working just meant that I had HIP support working, OpenCL was still falling at the first hurdle. Maybe AMD dropped support at some point? Maybe the 6000 series never had support? Regardless, for now it would seem that ROCm is not going to bring me much joy.

I still haven’t managed to get DaVinci Resolve to work on my system. I may give up for now and try using Distrobox again (Davincibox is often given as a solution, but I couldn’t even get it to recognize my GPU when I tried it). If I have any luck, I’ll share here.

The good news is that installing Rusticl seems to have at least gotten Digikam and Darktable working, so there’s been some result. Right now I have AMD ROCm and Rusticl installed side-by-side. I don’t know if there is any issue with that, but I might try removing AMD ROCm entirely and see how things go. It won’t fix Resolve, but maybe at least Blender can manage without ROCm? It would be nice.

[ikanotheokara]

Well, it took me a bit of fiddling and talking to myself on a public forum, but I’ve FINALLY gotten everything working.

Apparently, removing ROCm drivers completely got ROCm working inside distrobox containers. Is it kind of insane to run something as intensive as Resolve inside a container? Maybe? But it works!

Relevant lessons learned for anybody in a similar situation:

1. Probably most importantly, don’t mess with ROCm drivers outside of distrobox. They seem to have a lot of issues in Tumbleweed.
2. Rusticl might not be entirely ready for primetime, but if you want to use GPU acceleration for Digikam and Darktable, it works a treat. Don’t forget to add RUSTICL_ENABLE=radeonsi to each desktop file so rusticl loads with them.
3. Davincibox works. It works really well. But it would seem that you need to uninstall ROCm entirely from your host environment for it to work correctly (Maybe? I’m going to investigate this a little more.)
4. Blender needs ROCm for HIP support. Luckily, you can use Blender in davincibox, too; just use the self-contained version officially available on the website. Untar it somewhere convenient like ~/.local/opt/blender/ and open it from there. You will need to install HIP support in the davincibox environment with sudo dnf install rocm-hip.x86_64, but once you do that it will work perfectly. For easy launching, make a desktop file for it with Exec=distrobox-enter -n davincibox -- /PATH_TO_BLENDER_DIRECTORY/blender %f.

I hope I haven’t been too much of a nuisance, shouting into the void as I worked my way through this issue. Maybe somebody in the future will come across this post and it will saves them from spending as much time as I have getting this to work.