Arch Linux

Wouter92

Member

Registered: 2016-01-16

Posts: 3

Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

Hi all,

This is my first post, so first of all: what a great wiki and community!

I am installing Arch on my new laptop but for some reason when starting startx Arch freezes completely.
Before this happened I already had a working KDE environment, but then I had to force a reboot (because my screen light fell out) and after this I could not start Xorg anymore without freezing my system. Even the magic keys (REISUB) don't work, I have to do a forced reboot every time. Also, my fans started making a lot of noise from the moment this problem happened (and they won't shut up, unless I poweroff or disable the bumblebee daemon). The command journalctl also does not show anything.

The system freeze happens right after startx spawned:

(==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d"

Below the line I see a non-blinking cursor. I also checked the Xorg log and it was empty.

What I've tried:

• Format partitions and reinstall Arch from scratch

• Setting some intel GPU configuration options (see this wiki page)

• Adding i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 to boot options.

• Turn off bumblebee daemon: fans stopped making noise and startx said 'failed to set IOPL' (probably because I had no xorg.conf file)

System information:

• CPU: Intel Core i7 6700hq

• Dedicated GPU: Nvidia 960m

• I installed Bumblebee

If you need more information just ask

Last edited by Wouter92 (2016-01-17 01:34:14)

Wouter92

Member

Registered: 2016-01-16

Posts: 3

Re: Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

I think I just solved my error. Apparently this error line was important in the boot log:

 [drm:intel_dp_aux_ch] *ERROR* dp aux hw did not signal timeout

I looked it up and it has something to do with the skylake processor in linux kernels < 4.4. Thus to fix this I enabled the testing repository which has linux kernel 4.4 and updated my system with pacman -Syu. Now my startx  and my fans are back again working properly.

I will mark this thread as solved.

EDIT:

Ok, no I cheered to early, it is broken again. But, I discovered startx does not freeze when turning bbswitch ON. This means, running Xorg on the nvidia card works but not on the Intel one, I think? I don't now, however, how I can fix this...

Last edited by Wouter92 (2016-01-17 01:32:03)

x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

Moving to "Laptop Issues".

Wouter92

Member

Registered: 2016-01-16

Posts: 3

Re: Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

I solved the problem, it appears to be related to both bumblebee and the Nvidia driver. See also this Bumblebee issue.

When Bumblebee wants to turn off the Nvidia card, it will try to run rmmod nvidia. But when I run this command Arch says it cannot unload this module because it is used by nvidia_modeset. Apparently, this new module was added recently to the Nvidia driver and causes Bumblebee to lock up the system when starting startx (because he cannot turn off the Nvidia card).

So currently, there is no solution, but when Bumblebee 4.0 releases there probably will be one.

saaie

Member

From: Iran

Registered: 2015-05-13

Posts: 13

Re: Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

I solved this problem by adding a systemd service. The problem was occured because the nvidia module not loaded. Run the command below

modprobe nvidia

After that login with GDM. Now we create a systemd service to run this command automatically.

nano /etc/systemd/system/nvidia.service

[Unit]
Description=Nvidia Load
After=rc-local.service systemd-user-sessions.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c "/usr/bin/modprobe nvidia"

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable this service.

systemctl daemon-reload;systemctl enable nvidia.service

Epoxyc

Member

From: Tokyo

Registered: 2016-03-01

Posts: 33

Re: Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

I tried your solution, but after login, the nvidia card is still ON.
When I start bumblebeed service after login, cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch give me "0000:01:00.0 OFF".
But when I enable your service and bumblebeed service, cat /proc/acpi/bbswitch give me "0000:01:00.0 ON".
With your solution bumblebee don't disable nvidia card at startup.

saaie

Member

From: Iran

Registered: 2015-05-13

Posts: 13

Re: Xorg freezes when Nvidia card is off (Bumblebee)

You are right.
Disable my service and enable bumblebeed service, after that choose "Gnome on Wayland" session, you see OFF in /proc/acpi/bbswitch.