Arch Linux

colinh

Member

Registered: 2014-08-23

Posts: 19

Dell XPS 13 (2015) freezes with kernel 4.1.4-1-ARCH (and ALPM ?)

I've had this problem with various kernels (from testing or AUR) later than 4.0.6. After about 5 minutes the system freezes -- everything except keyboard backlight brightness key. But only when I'm running on battery, so I tried setting tlp settings for BAT the same as AC.

It seems the SATA aggressive link power management (ALPM) section causes the problem.
SATA_LINKPWR_ON_BAT=min_power --> freeze
SATA_LINKPWR_ON_BAT=max_performance  --> no freeze

I'm not sure which, if any, disk settings even make a difference to power consumption, since the laptop has a SSD (and it's not trivial to tell from the power usage readings because they fluctuate a lot and take some time, after booting, to get below 3W).

I can't see anything useful in journalctl.

I'm back on 4.0.6 for now. The only problem there is that I need to restart i3wm after a sleep/wake-up.

lkarunan

Member

Registered: 2015-05-11

Posts: 7

Re: Dell XPS 13 (2015) freezes with kernel 4.1.4-1-ARCH (and ALPM ?)

I encountered a similar  problem on my XPS13 2015 running KDE Plasma 5 after upgrading to (stock) kernel 4.1.5-1. that was not related to ALPM. The problem seems to have been solved by changing the OpenGL interface from GLX to EGL in System Settings=>Display and Monitor=>Compositor.

Edit: The step above did reduce the frequency of the freezes but did not eliminate the problem completely. I do not recall experiencing the issue with kernel 4.1.4-1, so I am going to downgrade to test.

Last edited by lkarunan (2015-08-21 14:32:08)

stanos4

Member

Registered: 2015-08-23

Posts: 2

Re: Dell XPS 13 (2015) freezes with kernel 4.1.4-1-ARCH (and ALPM ?)

hi, i've got the same problem running with fedora 22, kernel 4.1.5 (also lower versions of 4.1 have the same problem). Both, the medium_power and min_power cause freezes. In my case it affects consumption too much, since i've got sata controller integrated in cpu package, so it can go only to pkg%pc2 power state, that is ~+5W on battery... Does anybody have any idea how to solve this issue? running "echo SATA_ALPM_ENABLE=true | tee /etc/pm/config.d/sata_alpm" does not have an influence on power consumption/freezes. Kernel 3.19.8 worked fine. Did you find solution to your problem?

colinh

Member

Registered: 2014-08-23

Posts: 19

Re: Dell XPS 13 (2015) freezes with kernel 4.1.4-1-ARCH (and ALPM ?)

My "solution" is to use kernel 4.0.6 ;-)

Since this doesn't appear to be a standard problem, I'm wondering whether I made any changes to BIOS settings which nobody else has...

stanos4

Member

Registered: 2015-08-23

Posts: 2

Re: Dell XPS 13 (2015) freezes with kernel 4.1.4-1-ARCH (and ALPM ?)

I don't think its because of bios directly - I forgot to mention that I'm experiencing it on lenovo thinkpad t540p... but thanks for tip which kernel works