[L4D2] Game randomly crashes with coredump while steam game recording is enabled

[VinylVortex]

Running with launch options -novid -vulkan under Arch Linux

L4D2 will usually crash after a few minutes, I've found I can provoke the crash by continuously tabbing in and out of the game by clicking onto my second screen and back to the game window, but it's also crashed during regular gameplay.

Game was fine up until a few weeks ago where this started happening roughly after a system update on Nov 14, which included some packages back to Nov 11. Tried to downgrade the kernel back to the previous lts, no such luck and honestly I'm unsure which driver to downgrade or if that might cause worse issues.

Looking at journalctl has shown a coredump, I'm out of my element trying to understand it, but attempts to analyze it through gdb returns back missing symbols, coredump message:

Process 16648 (hl2_linux) of user 1000 dumped core.
                
                Stack trace of thread 16817:
                #0  0x00000000f71df487 n/a (/run/host/usr/lib32/libc.so.6 + 0x18f487)
                #1  0x00000000ab7162fc n/a (n/a + 0x0)
                ELF object binary architecture: Intel 80386

Did notice the folder /run/host/usr/lib32/libc.so.6 didn't exist and instead was under usr/lib32/libc.so.6, tried to create a syslink. While it only really made the crashes worse, it did let me read the symbols in the coredump as

Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xf6a26a1a in pthread_getspecific () from /run/host/usr/lib32/libc.so.6

As a last resort, reinstalled the entire OS. After installing steam, the game ran fine, tabbing in and out caused nothing and fully completed an hour run of singleplayer and another hour of multiplayer without issue. Crashes returned after setting up Steam's replay feature. Tried the Steam Flatpak, this is where I noticed the game recording being enabled provoked it. Haven't had an issue since disabling steam game recording, though I'd love to have the recording feature back.

Have played other games since having this issue. I had some issues with PEAK and Phasmophobia both crashing, but games like Dying Light, Dying Light: The Beast, Project Zomboid, Silksong, Portal 2 and TF2 are unaffected. Quickly did a test on PEAK, which was crashing randomly, when changing resolutions or tabbing out, no issue with replay disabled

System Information:

Computer Information:
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Model: X570 AORUS ELITE WIFI
Form Factor: Desktop
No Touch Input Detected

Processor Information:
CPU Vendor: AuthenticAMD
CPU Brand: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
CPU Family: 0x17
CPU Model: 0x71
CPU Stepping: 0x0
CPU Type: 0x0
Speed: 4673 MHz
24 logical processors
12 physical processors
Hyper-threading: Supported
FCMOV: Supported
SSE2: Supported
SSE3: Supported
SSSE3: Supported
SSE4a: Supported
SSE41: Supported
SSE42: Supported
AES: Supported
AVX: Supported
AVX2: Supported
AVX512F: Unsupported
AVX512PF: Unsupported
AVX512ER: Unsupported
AVX512CD: Unsupported
AVX512VNNI: Unsupported
SHA: Supported
CMPXCHG16B: Supported
LAHF/SAHF: Supported
PrefetchW: Unsupported
BMI1: Supported
BMI2: Supported
F16C: Supported
FMA: Supported

Operating System:
"Arch Linux" (64 bit)
Kernel Name: Linux
Kernel Version: 6.12.60-1-lts
X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation
X Server Release: 12401009
X Window Manager: KWin
Steam Runtime Version: steam-runtime_1.0.20250929.168578

Client Information:
Version: 1763795278
Browser GPU Acceleration Status: Enabled
Browser Canvas: Enabled
Browser Canvas out-of-process rasterization: Enabled
Browser Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
Browser Compositing: Enabled
Browser Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
Browser OpenGL: Enabled
Browser Rasterization: Enabled
Browser Raw Draw: Disabled
Browser Skia Graphite: Disabled
Browser Video Decode: Enabled
Browser Video Encode: Disabled
Browser Vulkan: Disabled
Browser WebGL: Enabled
Browser WebGL2: Enabled
Browser WebGPU: Disabled
Browser WebNN: Disabled

Video Card:
Driver: AMD AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT (radeonsi, gfx1200, LLVM 21.1.5, DRM 3.61, 6.12.60-1-lts)
Driver Version: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 25.2.7-arch1.1
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 143 Hz
VendorID: 0x1002
DeviceID: 0x7590
Revision Not Detected
Number of Monitors: 2
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 2560 x 1440
Desktop Resolution: 3840 x 1440
Primary Display Size: 23.50" x 13.23" (26.97" diag), 59.7cm x 33.6cm (68.5cm diag)
Primary VRAM: 16384 MB

Sound card:
Audio device: USB Mixer

Memory:
RAM: 32012 Mb

VR Hardware:
VR Headset: None detected
No VR configuration with trackers detected
Most number of trackers in a session: 0

Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English
LANG: en_US.UTF-8
Total Hard Disk Space Available: 952844 MB
Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 913082 MB
Storage:
Number of SSDs: 4
SSD sizes: 4000G,1000G,1000G,1000G
Number of HDDs: 0
Number of removable drives: 1
Removable drive sizes: 15G