Fedora 44, Intel OpenGL driver, RAM overflow issue

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1

Fedora 44 shows a RAM overflow issue when I use VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics) on my Intel i7 PC (Dell Optiplex 7080), but it doesn’t show any issues on my Ryzen 7 ThinkPad.
When I use
“MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=crocus vmd” or “MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink vmd”, the RAM overflow stops, but the points become pixelated.
Gemini suggests it’s an issue with the Intel OpenGL driver (Mesa iris).

Here are the details of my PC.

System Details Report

Report details

  • Date generated: 2026-08-07 19:43:37

Hardware Information:

  • Hardware Model: Dell Inc. OptiPlex 7080
  • Memory: 16.0 GiB
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-10700 × 16
  • Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (CML GT2)
  • Disk Capacity: 1.5 TB

Software Information:

  • Firmware Version: 1.37.0

  • OS Name: Fedora Linux 44 (Workstation Edition)

  • OS Build: (null)

  • OS Type: 64-bit

  • GNOME Version: 50

  • Windowing System: Wayland

  • Kernel Version: Linux 7.1.6-201.fc44.x86_64

    Thanks in advance!

2

What is the exact error that you see and what app reported that to you?

3

It is open-source software for visualising molecular dynamics trajectories.

Link: https://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/

It doesn’t produce any error. Once I load my trajectory and play it in the software RAM usage starts to increase gradually from 4.5GB, which is the base. Within a few minutes, the RAM will be full, and then the whole system will hang. This happens in my system which is fedora 44, Intel® Core™ i7-10700, Graphics: Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (CML GT2), OpenGL renderer: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (CML GT2).

In this same system, when I load and play my trajectory with the OpenGL renderer: zink Vulkan 1.4(Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (CML GT2) (INTEL_OPEN_SOURCE_MESA)), the RAM usage stops at 4.5-4.8GB, but the points representation in the viewer gets pixelated.

In Fedora 42 and on the same machine, when I load and play the trajectory in VMD, with MESA, it works fine. No RAM overflow and no pixelation.

In another ThinkPad E14 with an AMD Ryzen 7 chip and Fedora 44, the VMD works well too.

4

Try asking the authors for help as it serms like as issue with running vmd on a new libraries.

5

this indeed may be a mesa iris driver issue. You could try installing different mesa versions. Latest for F44 is 26.1.6, pushed to stable just a day ago.
You could also test the older version 26.0.3 from the fedora repo. sudo dnf downgrade mesa\*

You mentioned F42 (mesa 25.1.9 ) had no issues. Your other option would be to use distrobox and create an f42 container and run the application in that container.