Arch Linux

farad

Member

Registered: 2017-02-12

Posts: 6

[Solved] Lenovo G70 - external HDMI connector does not work

Hello Community!

I have a Lenovo G70-70 notebook, which works fine with Arch, except for a few limitations regarding external display connectors.
While the external VGA-connector works fine, I cannot get any signal from the HDMI port next to it.

My notebook has two graphics cards:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0b)
03:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M/810M/820M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev a1)

According to lsmod the kernel loaded the i915 and nouveau drivers.

video                  36864  3 nouveau,i915,ideapad_laptop

My desktop environment is GNOME on Wayland.

When connected via VGA I can see the internal (XWAYLAND0) and external monitor (XWAYLAND1) in the output of xrandr. When connected via HDMI, the external monitor is just missing.

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3520 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
XWAYLAND0 connected 1600x900+0+0 380mm x 210mm
   1600x900      59.95*+
XWAYLAND1 connected 1920x1080+1600+0 530mm x 300mm
   1920x1080     59.96*+

(That xrandr only shows the current mode is probably another problem not related to this issue.)

While not showing any output, the monitor definitely recognizes that some device is connected to it via HDMI when it is connected to the notebook. The monitor stays in HDMI mode until I disconnect the cable and only then starts testing the other input sources again.

In dmesg, nouveau repeatedly sends the following messages:

[30797.634211] nouveau 0000:03:00.0: DRM: evicting buffers...
[30797.634212] nouveau 0000:03:00.0: DRM: waiting for kernel channels to go idle...
[30797.634244] nouveau 0000:03:00.0: DRM: suspending client object trees...
[30797.634521] nouveau 0000:03:00.0: DRM: suspending kernel object tree...
[30869.092241] nouveau 0000:03:00.0: DRM: resuming kernel object tree...
[30869.195916] nouveau 0000:03:00.0: DRM: resuming client object trees...

In the last iteration, messages stop at the "suspending kernel object tree..." line.

Any ideas how to proceed are welcome!

Regards,

farad

P.S.:
Yes, the monitor and HDMI cable work in the same configuration with a Raspberry Pi and are OK ;-)

Last edited by farad (2017-02-18 20:07:35)

farad

Member

Registered: 2017-02-12

Posts: 6

Re: [Solved] Lenovo G70 - external HDMI connector does not work

Problem solved!

The problem seemed to be the combination of the HDMI cable and my notebook. A different (much shorter) HDMI cable works without any problems.
I just wonder why the Raspberry PI worked with the long cable. I didn't expect it to have more power on the HDMI connector than my notebook.

Last edited by farad (2017-02-18 20:08:31)