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#1 2014-04-12 10:30:12

freijon
Member
From: Switzerland
Registered: 2014-04-05
Posts: 39

X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

Hey everyone,

I'm having this annoying issue where X freezes randomly, I can't tell exactly when it happens. But when it happens, the following occurs:

- Screen is frozen, sometimes turns black, sometimes turns black and reappears, but still frozen.
- Cursor and sound (e.g. music) still works
- When switching to a new tty (CTRL-ALT-F6), I can log in and restart gdm using

sudo systemctl restart gdm

- When I'm in the other tty and trying to switch back to the graphical view, I get stuck completely, not even switching consoles works now.Reset is the only option from there
- Blindly restarting gnome-shell doesn't work

I somehow have the feeling, it happens more often when I physically move my laptop, but thats just a gut feeling. It also happens often when my screen is locked and I try to log back in.

I found this bug report, but its quite old and that doesn't help me: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14594

Any help would be very appreciated, its really annoying to lose my work so often.

My specs:
$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Chelsea XT GL [FirePro M4000]
Gallium 0.4 on AMD CAPE VERDE

Last edited by freijon (2014-04-12 10:33:22)

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#2 2014-04-12 13:56:36

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

Any relevant info in the logs or systemd's journal?

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#3 2014-04-14 21:07:21

freijon
Member
From: Switzerland
Registered: 2014-04-05
Posts: 39

Re: X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

I can't tell whether they're relevant, but there are some errors:

journalctl -n 100 wrote:

$ journalctl -n 100 | grep ERROR
Apr 14 22:51:11 arch kernel: [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state] *ERROR* si_set_sw_state failed
Apr 14 22:51:22 arch kernel: [drm:r600_ib_test] *ERROR* radeon: fence wait failed (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:22 arch kernel: [drm:radeon_ib_ring_tests] *ERROR* radeon: failed testing IB on GFX ring (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:24 arch kernel: [drm:si_dpm_set_power_state] *ERROR* si_set_sw_state failed
Apr 14 22:51:25 arch kernel: [drm:r600_ib_test] *ERROR* radeon: fence wait failed (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:25 arch kernel: [drm:radeon_ib_ring_tests] *ERROR* radeon: failed testing IB on GFX ring (-35).
Apr 14 22:51:25 arch kernel: [drm:radeon_pm_resume_dpm] *ERROR* radeon: dpm resume failed

I uploaded the full logs here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0x3xed11zr13x … ogs.tar.gz in case anyone would like to check it out.

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#4 2014-04-15 23:41:32

ndowens04
Member
Registered: 2009-05-07
Posts: 25

Re: X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

Yeah I have this issue as well. Though the weird thing is that it only happens for me in cinnamon DE and not MATE


ArchLinux + ZFS

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#5 2014-04-21 10:24:18

litrelord
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2011-05-15
Posts: 3

Re: X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

Also getting the same problem.

I got round it for now by disabling dpm (add radeon.dpm=0 to the kernel parameters).

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#6 2014-04-22 18:08:56

freijon
Member
From: Switzerland
Registered: 2014-04-05
Posts: 39

Re: X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

litrelord wrote:

Also getting the same problem.

I got round it for now by disabling dpm (add radeon.dpm=0 to the kernel parameters).

I gave it a try, but I still got the freeze at some point after setting the parameter

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#7 2014-05-13 12:36:16

litrelord
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2011-05-15
Posts: 3

Re: X freezes randomly, screen turning black or flickering

It definitely seems to be a problem with DPM. you could try changing the dpm settings manually to see if one of them is causing the problem:

Dynamic Power Managament

Alternatively there's radeon-tray in the AUR so you can change the power profile on the fly:

radeon-tray

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