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I just finished a fresh install and am encountering a problem where the video drivers appear to stop working just about the time the login prompt is displayed. I can boot from the live image (with caveats, see below) without issue. Additionally, when booting from disk I am able to see all the systemd status prints just before the screen briefly flickers, I see the login prompt momentarily, and then the monitor goes black and enters low power mode.
An interesting, and likely related, note: I had to use the June build of the Arch image -- July and August did not work. The latter two images exhibited the same behavior as above. That is, I could not even boot these images from USB. So, I installed with the June image but, as part of the install process, I updated the system. Considering that all of this happens before I can login and I do not have any userland video drivers installed it must be a kernel video driver issue, right? Can I override which is used or what mode it changes to after boot?
I do not know enough about the architecture of the kernel and its default video mode to begin debugging. What should I be looking for in the kernel? Or what else may be the root of my problem if not kernel video drivers? I have a discrete graphics card (NVidia GTX 970) that is using DVI to HDMI for my monitors. I also have two HDMI outputs on my motherboard. I tried using those video outputs directly in case the kernel switched to using them, but to no avail.
Last edited by sherrellbc (2016-08-21 11:19:24)
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As suspected, I was able to fix the problem by downgrading to a different kernel release. I actually changed from mainline to LTS and everything works. Of course, I would rather solve the underlying problem rather than avoid it by switching to a different kernel.
That said, I noticed that the font is rather large when the first messages are printed to the screen. The "screen flicker" I mentioned earlier happens when the system appears to be making some video driver adjustments. Actually, this same flickering behavior occurs with the LTS kernel as well, it's just that the screen is re-renedered with smaller font rather than sending my monitor into a low-power mode.
A few weeks ago I posted a similar question after allowing a kernel upgrade that broke my system, so I am able to attribute the kernel update that started causing me issues. As seen over at my other question it was an upgrade from kernel 4.5.4-1 to 4.6.1.2 where I first saw the problem. The newer Arch releases are on 4.7, so the problem is persisting.
Last edited by sherrellbc (2016-08-21 14:08:56)
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I also noticed that, after a while, once successfully booted my left monitor (the same 'Main' one, I guess, since it is the first to come up and be mirrored to the other on boot) will go to sleep and the screen turns black. The right monitor, though, does nothing and remains on. Possibly related. The left monitor is the only one that shows anything during early boot and is the one that exhibits the flickering/low-power behavior described above.
Last edited by sherrellbc (2016-08-21 14:33:30)
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