Arch + xorgxrdp (glamor) + NVIDIA (DRI3)

Short explanation of the working stack that avoids the i915/GEM shmem leak by using the NVIDIA render node for XRDP.

Disclaimer

This gist was drafted with help from an AI assistant based on a live debugging session on this host. Verify details before applying to your system.

What is running

• XRDP + xorgxrdp (glamor build)
• DRI3 enabled
• NVIDIA render node (/dev/dri/renderD129) used by xrdp Xorg
• Intel i915 is not used for the XRDP session rendering

System specs (current)

• Kernel: 6.18.5-zen1-1-zen (x86_64)
• GPUs:
  • Intel HD 630 (i915) 00:02.0 [8086:591b]
  • NVIDIA GTX 1050 Mobile 01:00.0 [10de:1c8d]
• X server: XLibre X Server 1.25.0
• XRDP: 0.10.4.1
• NVIDIA driver: 580.126.09

Packages (relevant)

• xrdp 0.10.4.1-2
• xlibre-xorgxrdp-glamor 0.10.4-2
• xlibre-xserver-bootstrap 25.0.0.20-1
• xlibre-xserver-common 25.0.0.20-1
• xlibre-xserver-devel 25.0.0.20-1
• mesa 1:25.3.3-2
• nvidia-580xx-dkms 580.126.09-1
• nvidia-580xx-utils 580.126.09-1
• pipewire-module-xrdp 0.2-1

Why it fixes the leak

With DRI3 + glamor on i915, XRDP allocates large GEM objects that grow over time and land in shmem, causing OOM. Pointing XRDP to the NVIDIA render node moves the rendering workload away from i915 and the growth stops. nvidia-smi confirms Xorg is using GPU memory.

Key config (xorgxrdp)

Find render nodes on your system:

ls -lah /dev/dri

Map render nodes to Intel/NVIDIA:

udevadm info -q property -n /dev/dri/renderD128 | rg -n 'ID_PATH|DRIVER'
udevadm info -q property -n /dev/dri/renderD129 | rg -n 'ID_PATH|DRIVER'

Then match with PCI IDs:

lspci -nnk | rg -n -A3 -B1 '00:02.0|01:00.0'

Or use the by-path symlinks:

ls -lah /dev/dri/by-path

Previous (Intel i915 render node):

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Video Card (xrdpdev)"
    Driver "xrdpdev"
    Option "DRMDevice" "/dev/dri/renderD128"
    Option "DRI3" "1"
    Option "DRMAllowList" "amdgpu i915 msm radeon"
EndSection

Current (NVIDIA render node):

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Video Card (xrdpdev)"
    Driver "xrdpdev"
    Option "DRMDevice" "/dev/dri/renderD129"
    Option "DRI3" "1"
    Option "DRMAllowList" "nvidia i915 amdgpu msm radeon"
EndSection

Restart XRDP after change:

sudo systemctl restart xrdp xrdp-sesman

Verify

nvidia-smi

Xorg should appear using NVIDIA VRAM.