(In reply to comment #13)
> Also, the fact that disabling audio on a newer kernel doesn't break things

If I disable audio, shouldn't the Radeon HDMI ALSA device disappear? That
didn't happen for me when I set radeon.audio=0. Am I doing something wrong?

> The audio hardware doesn't interact with the memory controller (or 3D engine
> for that matter) so I don't really see how it could cause a GPU page fault. 

Could it be a timing issue? Audio init delays startup enough that it doesn't
hit some races anymore?

A broken system sometimes managed to recover after coming back from suspend,
though rarely.