Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

linduxed · 2016-09-10 10:17:49

For about a month or two I've had the following issue:

Laptop works fine for an unspecified amount of time, then all of a sudden the screen starts flickering rapidly between what seems like an off-state and the picture, not unlike what it looks like when the resolution is changed, except continuously.

Most of the times this happens the flickering is heavily favouring the off-state, so everything's dark. The few times the flickering has been less intense, I've also noticed that the computer seems significantly less responsive: even such a thing as typing in a terminal lags behind the input.

Here's the interesting part: at first I noticed that doing a quick suspend-resume fixed the issue temporarily. Sure, the flickering and lowered responsiveness would come back eventually (as mentioned, unclear when/why), but until then the laptop would work normally.

I then figured out that the following command is sufficient to achieve the same temporary remedy:

xrandr --output eDP1 --off && sleep 1 && xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 3200x1800

I believe it would work without the sleep as well, but I put it in there to make it more visible that the command was run when I activate it through a mapping.

So basically something has happened (I have no idea what) that is causing the laptop to spaz out from time to time and turning the screen on and off is sufficient to calm it down.

Any ideas?

mpan · 2016-09-10 13:40:18

If dmesg says nothing interesting (see it), then maybe dying backlight power supply?

Responsiveness problems correlated with the flickering are not typical for this issue, but also not impossible — I could imagine that if something detects the screen going off and on all the time, it might cause such condition too.

linduxed · 2016-09-10 15:57:40

I've noticed that from time to time I get above mentioned lowered responsiveness, without any flickering.

This too is remedied with the command written above.

As for dmesg, the only thing that looks somewhat interesting is this:

[106916.331510] [drm:intel_pipe_update_start [i915]] *ERROR* Potential atomic update failure on pipe A

I'm not sure whether it actually is relevant though, since there were two lines of this prior to running the xrandr command (when the responsiveness was affected), and then another one was added to the dmesg output when the command was run.

mpan · 2016-09-11 07:38:19

Run `dmesg -ew` in a terminal and let it stay there for between few to dozen occurances of the problem. See if any messages are correlated with the issue.

Last edited by mpan (2016-09-11 07:38:31)

linduxed · 2016-09-15 20:42:15

Unfortunately, neither do any of the errors printed look relevant (it's mostly above demonstrated drm:intel_pipe... and a couple of temperature related errors), nor do they occur anywhere close to the occurrences of the flickering/slowdowns.

I don't think dmesg will help me here.

linduxed · 2016-11-30 14:21:54

For anyone finding this thread, wondering whether this was resolved somehow:

I found no logs/data that pointed me toward any solution. I opted to map the command in the OP to an F-key and simply hit it whenever the laptop started acting up.

Some time between now and the last post the problematic behaviour stopped. I'm assuming some kernel update fixed whatever issue I was experiencing, but I don't know for sure.

So, to any future reader: if you're experiencing something like I described above, my guess is that you should update your system and hope for the best.

Arch Linux

#1 2016-09-10 10:17:49

Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

#2 2016-09-10 13:40:18

Re: Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

#3 2016-09-10 15:57:40

Re: Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

#4 2016-09-11 07:38:19

Re: Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

#5 2016-09-15 20:42:15

Re: Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

#6 2016-11-30 14:21:54

Re: Flickering screen and reduced responsiveness

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