Configuring The Finals for Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite (Linux) / disabling AVX-512

[Yeti]

Here's a quick post with a short guide on configuring The Finals for Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite.

Easy Anti-Cheat support seems to have been silently enabled as of update 1.4.1 on January 11th. With the EAC box checked, there are numerous reports of Linux and Steam Deck users being able to play The Finals with performance close to or equivalent to Windows. General updates and discussion of Proton compatibility can be followed in the Proton/The Finals issue tracker on Github here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7317

A common issue reported from Linux users after the silent update is that CPUs supporting the AVX-512 instruction set (e.g. AMD Ryzen 7000, Intel 10th gen, Intel 11th gen) are experiencing frequent crashes. A (hopefully temporary) workaround to this issue is to modify the kernel arguments that are loaded when booting into your system. The kernel argument that needs to be added to a system is the following: "clearcpuid=304".

In most Linux operating systems, a simple google search of "how to add kernel arguments to <operating system> is usually sufficient to find a clear guide. I had a harder time finding this for Fedora Kinoite (or Silverblue) because the OS architecture for Kinoite is different from standard Fedora, so searching "how to add kernel arguments Fedora" yielded bad guides. Thankfully, there is good documentation on how to do this. The relevant guide can be found in the documentation for Fedora CoreOS, which Kinoite and Silverblue are built on top of. The relevant guide can be found here under the "modifying kernel arguments on existing systems" header: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/kernel-args/#_modifying_kernel_arguments_on_existing_systems

The exact terminal command that I used was:
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append="clearcpuid=304"

Once you have rebooted your system, you can visually confirm that you were successful by running a terminal and using the following command:
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --editor

This will display a list of all active kernel arguments for your system (don't bother trying to edit from here, though, unless you know what you're doing).

I hope this is helpful to the Linux fans that need a more direct guide!

[Crystalyne]

Many thanks! Was scratching my head over this one!