Arch Linux

lightandshadow

Member

Registered: 2012-03-18

Posts: 8

random blackouts/flickering on laptop

Hi everyone!
I hope I'm posting this to the right subforum, so please close/move this thread if I messed up.

I have a custom-built laptop that I'm using with Arch since ~2 years. Everything worked flawlessly up until about a Month ago.
Since then, I occasionally get strange blackouts/flickers on my screen. The general symptoms are like this:

I'm using the laptop for an extended amount of time, and all of the sudden, usually while browsing the web (chromium), the screen all of the sudden turns black for about half a second, then turns back on for half a second, then turns black again, etc. This "flickering" goes on without end, sometimes showing just parts of the sceen (top half, bottom half). The flickers are not exactly regular, but average out to being about half a second of on/off time each time. The screen is actually "off" in the blackout time, with not even the background lighting being active (so not displaying black pixels, but not displaying anything at all).
It doesn't seem to be related to any hardware action I perform (opening, closing the lid or anything) and it's also not really related to sleep/hibernation usage. I would have guessed this would be a hardware issue with the screen and I should probably contact the seller (even though warranty already expired), but here's the strange thing:
The one reliable way to stop the flickering is rebooting the laptop. This is not related to opening/closing the lid, so it doesn't seem like a bad/broken contact that is possibly temporarily restored by operating the lid, but maybe rather a driver/firmware issue of the graphics chip.

I cannot really say when I observed this for the first time, and I'm having a hard time coming up with a way to diagnose and debug this.
I'd appreciate any suggestions!

Regards,
Carsten

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,423

Re: random blackouts/flickering on laptop

Graphics issues should always be accompanied with information about the environment run in, the graphics chip and drivers used as well as a xorg and a journal log.

However the symptoms read like a common issue that's prevalent right now, so I'm going to stab a guess and say you are using intel graphics, try adding

i915.enable_psr=0

to your kernel parameters and check if that helps.

Mod note: Moving  to NC