Dear Maintainer,

Starting with 25.3.2-2, the VA drivers have been packaged in mesa-libgallium, causing VA to be forcibly enabled, which is an issue because old Radeons are affected by driver bugs that cause frequent freezes whenever VA is enabled. A wide range of Radeon-branded cards, discrete and integrated, appear to be affected, from TeraScale to GCN.

As VA is used by a variety of different software, not just video players, the hangs happen all the time even when videos are not being actively played (opening a folder in nautilus, where a video is present may be all it takes). Disabling VA at the client software level would be a game of whack-a-mole and some programs may not have a switch.

While pointing at the kernel might seem the appropriate course of action here, the radeon module is considered legacy and older cards won't be supported in amdgpu.

The problem has become hard to treat because the mesa-va-drivers package no longer exists, whereas previously uninstalling it was an easy enough solution.

When the change (that currently hit trixie-backports) finally makes it to stable, this problem is going to generate no small amount of pain for users of these older cards, which otherwise are more than enough for everyday desktop tasks.

With no upstream fix in sight, could a workaround be taken into consideration, such as:

- blacklisting VA for the affected cards in mesa (as an added benefit, it would not require user knowledge/intervention)
- an easy opt-out to disable VA manually