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I have been struggling with this issue for many years, and I may have found a nice workaround.
(TL;DR: Disable HWcursor)
Symptom: sometimes (maybe once or twice a day), when clicking on some random button (anything, apparently), the laptop completely freezes. The mouse/touchpad pointer doesn’t move, the keyboard doesn’t respond at all… There's nothing to do but to power off the machine. No useful log messages (the most I got was a bunch of “@ @ @ @ [...]” at the end of Xorg.0.log).
This only happens when I use the nouveau driver, regardless of what distro or desktop environment I use. For years I chose to use the Nvidia proprietary driver instead. It was very stable--the only downside was that I never got around to using virtual console (tty) with the native resolution of my display (1600 x 900), and this has always bothered me. Currently, Nvidia no longer supports drivers for my card, so I decided to insist on nouveau once again.
A viable workaround (found in many forums) was to add the “nouveau.noaccel=1” kernel parameter (as long as I removed the xf86-video-nouveau package, otherwise my graphical interface wouldn’t start). Obviously we are trading performance for stability here, but it works. No random system lockups anymore. But I still wasn’t happy.
Finally, I seem to have found a way to get the best of both worlds: 3d acceleration and stability (hallelujah). Reinstalled xf86-video-nouveau, removed the “nouveau.noaccel=1” kernel parameter, then started fiddling with the different options under the graphics card section on /etc/X11/xorg.conf (and if you’re into combinatorial analysis, you may appreciate how time consuming this trial-and-error approach is, with all the rebooting and testing and everything). The one that seemed to do the trick was disabling hardware cursor (Option "HWcursor" "False"). I have had no lockups ever since. The only noticeable side effect is that now the mouse pointer sometimes blinks (barely an inconvenience).
On a side note, while keeping track of the Xorg.0.log entries, I had noticed multiple warnings that my touchpad was sending values outside the expected range (e.g. “Axis 0x35 value 4000 is outside expected range [0, 3000]”). I don’t think this issue contributed to the freezing problem at all, but I fixed it by running touchpad-edge-detector, creating a “/etc/udev/hwdb.d/61-evdev-local.hwdb” file and running “systemd-hwdb update” (basically following the instructions on https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinpu … anges.html).
Anyway, I hope this is useful to anyone out there facing the same kind of trouble.
Last edited by macflav (2020-04-08 11:27:51)
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