Arch Linux

Archonaut

Member

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 7

Virtual Console: no text, white screen after resume (setfont fixes it)

After a resume from hibernate or suspend, all my virtual consoles have what seems to be a font issue and present an unusable, white screen. (mostly white, depends on the actual font color, see screen shots below)
This does not happen after a normal boot; it happens only after a resume. After a boot the consoles are ok, only the next sleep/resume will mess them up.
Other than that, everything else seems to run fine: X works ok, no processes stuck on 100% or other weirdness, no error messages that might be related to this ...

So, for example, after the resume process finishes and I'm back in X Window, if I switch to tty1 (with a Ctrl-Alt-F1), it would look something like this:

Image A: "Corrupt tty1"

... when obviously it should look like this instead:

Image B: "Correct tty1"

I can get the actual content of tty1 (from /dev/vcsa1) and indeed it matches exactly that of image B.

The other consoles have a similar look. (But if the only text present in their buffers is the "login:" prompt and since that doesn't have any colors in it, the whole screen will just be full of white block characters anyway). The console screens will remain corrupted even during a subsequent sleep/shutdown.

Also, during resume/wake-up the tty1 is active and visible and the text is ok. A few moments later in the process the screen is cleared, but it's still in text mode as you can see the text cursor blinking in the upper-left; then finally the whole display switches to X and the cursor goes away. It is after that sometimes I can catch a glimpse of the screen flashing white (one such occurrence prompted me to investigate further and I discovered the problem with the consoles ... otherwise I don't care much about the text mode these days).

There is a sort-of-clunky workaround: The keyboard works ok in any virtual console, so I can login "blind". NOW, once logged in, if I run a "setfont" command in that particular console, it will fix the problem not only for the current console but in all of them (so after that, the tty1 will look correct, as image B and all the other consoles will have normal text).
However, this "fix" is not persistent: after the next sleep/resume, all the virtual console will get back to the corrupted/white screen state.

I have been running Arch for years without any such issues. I think this started happening a few months ago, after an upgrade.
A few other bits of info about my context:

1. My vconsole.conf content doesn't seem to matter: the same behavior is present with or without a vconsole.conf. And anyhow, I've never touched before this any settings related to the console fonts or locales.

2. I tried to use the consolefont hook for mkinitcpio. I can see during normal boot the font change taking place, but the resume "white" screen issue described above is still happening.

3. The journal does not have any errors that would be related to this. The systemd-vconsole-setup.service apparently runs just fine and exits with success. Restarting/re-running this service post-resume does not fix the problem.

   • (Also, I've seen mentioned that this systemd-vconsole-setup.service can be unreliable or at least that it can end up running too early and its settings are later on overridden. Is that the source of all this behavior ? Although I tried to make that run as late as possible and there is no change. But again, as I already mentioned: explicitly running that service after the whole wake up ends does not fix the issue.)

4. I don't have plymouth installed

5. I have an Nvidia card, using the Nvidia drivers (so not Nouveau)

6. I am using lightdm.

Is anyone experiencing something similar ? The closest thing I've seen in the forums is maybe Problem with CLI fonts after installation (which is still open).
Another one would be TTY console is messed up/unreadable, marked as solved, but unfortunately the solution described there does not work for me (commenting out FONT in vconsole.conf: as I said, changing that file or oven removing it completely doesn't fix the problem).
From other variations and close matches, nothing that would lead to a solution.

Any ideas on what is actually going on ?

Thank you.