Arch Linux

dmidge

Member

Registered: 2015-04-04

Posts: 69

NVidia with Linux - screens keeps waking up randomly

Hi everyone,

I have an issue that has been bothering me for a long time (several years). And from time to time, I was searching for the solution, but it never came out to be conclusive, so the issue lingers. I guess it is time to ask the community. It may helps others in the same situation too!

The problem
My screens keeps waking up when it turned in screen power saving mode. (The "turn off screen" parameter in System Setting - Power management).

The likely culprit
At first, I was looking at some notifications. It is hard to investigate, but I don't think it is the case.
The most likely reason (I guess) (what I suspect) is that the screens enters in sleep mode after a delay, when the screen goes black. Then the screens polls the input to find an active source. And then, at the cycling to the desktop input, it sends signals to ask for data, which creates and activity (similar to moving the mouse), which then wakes up the system (including the screens). It is similar to what is said there.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … -my-screen
Now, my issue is that the screens do now allow to be set on one static input... The only way to test for sure would be to find a way to ignore these devices changes.

Following consequences
- After a number of cycling on and off, the display gets broken. I usually have to kill/restart plasmashell manually.
- Sometimes, one of the two screens didn't wake up and then I have to manually change back the display
- Sometimes, I need to restart the computer entirely because I cannot get back a display without killing X.
So yeah, pretty annoying.

In addition, NVidia poorly supports the sleep mode. So putting my computer to sleep usually ends up with similar issues...

Configuration
My desktop is running archlinux, with KDE/Plasma. I doubt that the reason is KDE. My desktop is a custom build with a NVidia GTX1050Ti (did I say I had the problem for several years? ).

Relevant part of lspci -vvv

08:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. Device 6251
        Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx+
        Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
        Latency: 0
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 80
        IOMMU group: 13
        Region 0: Memory at fb000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
        Region 1: Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        Region 3: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
        Region 5: I/O ports at d000 [size=128]
        Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [virtual] [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: <access denied>
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia

The version of the linux kernel:

% pacman -Qii linux
Name            : linux
Version         : 6.13.1.arch2-1
Description     : The Linux kernel and modules
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://github.com/archlinux/linux
Licenses        : GPL-2.0-only
Groups          : None
Provides        : KSMBD-MODULE  VIRTUALBOX-GUEST-MODULES  WIREGUARD-MODULE
Depends On      : coreutils  initramfs  kmod
Optional Deps   : linux-firmware: firmware images needed for some devices [installed]
                  scx-scheds: to use sched-ext schedulers
                  wireless-regdb: to set the correct wireless channels of your country [installed]
Required By     : None
Optional For    : base
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : virtualbox-guest-modules-arch  wireguard-arch
Installed Size  : 138,25 MiB
Packager        : Jan Alexander Steffens (heftig) <heftig@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : ven. 07 févr. 2025 23:24:02
Install Date    : sam. 08 févr. 2025 16:21:19
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : No
Validated By    : Signature
Backup Files    : None
Extended Data   : pkgtype=split

Any idea to fix that? Any questions or suggestions are welcomed.