Arch Linux

AmagicalFishy

Member

Registered: 2016-12-10

Posts: 69

Arch freezes [seemingly] at random after login via SDDM

Ok. I've had this problem for a while, and I'm trying pretty hard to get to the bottom of it.

First, my laptop is an Optimus laptop—I've tried both Bumblebee and Prime, have followed a bunch of different tutorials on the Arch wiki. to no avail. I'm using the nouveau drivers and KDE. This is a pretty new installation of Arch, and these problems were here since the initial install.

Often, when logging into Arch via SDDM, I will be presented with a black screen. Nothing moves (no mouse pointer) and everything is frozen. This persists for a few seconds until the computer shuts itself down. Two other problems which I believe are related to this are: When I attempt to shut down using the command `shutdown -r now`, the whole computer hangs. If I wait for a few minutes, it eventually shuts down normally. I believe this hang is related to SDDM or the fact that my laptop is of [the dreaded] Optimus type. The second problem is, when the computer comes up from sleep (i.e. - when I re-open the lid of the laptop) things seem to start up normally (I am shown the desktop wallpaper, mouse pointer, etc.), and then the computer shuts down.

I've read through thousands of lines of logs. Though I have a difficult time knowing which lines are related, serious errors and which are "oh. that's normal" errors. I've  uploaded here a large chunk of my `everything.log`, during which these things happened (the file is too large to put on pastebin):

- I successfully logged in
- I attempted to shut-down. The freeze occurred.
- I attempted to log in and froze up again

Here is a pastebin of my errors.log
Here is a pastebin of my daemon.log
Here is a pastebin output of journalctl -u sddm

Problems that I think are related: `lspci -v` hangs (but the rest of the system is usable), and the computer shuts down after a minute or so.

Keep in mind that the "freeze after login" happens about 75% of the time. If I try it enough, I will eventually get through. Sometimes I have success switching to one of the 'Advanced Options' (but that doesn't consistently work). Is the seeming randomness indicative of a race condition? If so, I've read about SDDM no loading video drivers in time, but I have tried the stall-sddm-fixes for that with no obvious changes.

I have tried the `nouveau.modeset=0` kernel parameter with success, but, if I use that, my external monitor (connected to the Nvidia GPU) is never detected, and I need to be able to use it.

please help me

Last edited by AmagicalFishy (2019-12-30 19:12:41)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,404

Re: Arch freezes [seemingly] at random after login via SDDM

There are a few nouveau issues indeed. You will get farther with the nvidia driver, if you want it to be enabled and use the external screen I suggest you follow the instructions in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NV … phics_only (and only that subheader, check the SDDM section and remove xf86-video-intel if installed)

AmagicalFishy

Member

Registered: 2016-12-10

Posts: 69

Re: Arch freezes [seemingly] at random after login via SDDM

Ah! Bummer. There's a noticeable decrease in rendering quality when I use the NVIDIA driver, I was hoping to avoid it.

Would you mind pointing out to me where you saw the nouveau issues? (So that, for the future, I can identify them). I saw some things like nouveau stalled on fffffff

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,404

Re: Arch freezes [seemingly] at random after login via SDDM

Your error log is quite full of them with failures to resume the GPU (from suspend or generally power states) your everything log has a metric ton of stack crashes (never a good sign and especially not in that frequency) starting line 2500 or so until the reboot and continuing again after a while.

One slight hope for the nouveau driver here is using

nouveau.runpm=0

and not using any power saving daemons like TLP or powertop or so. but that's a big slight.

Last edited by V1del (2019-12-30 23:45:18)

AmagicalFishy

Member

Registered: 2016-12-10

Posts: 69

Re: Arch freezes [seemingly] at random after login via SDDM

Ok! So I tried the Nvidia driver for a while, and everything worked well except:
- The computer would not remain on w/ battery power. The battery could be charged to 100%, but, if I started Arch—the computer would immediately shut down and not turn on again until I plugged it in (as if the battery were out). I know the battery had sufficient charge because I could plug the laptop in, turn it on, unplug the laptop, then play games on Windows for 45 min. before it shut down
- The laptop would get very hot just sitting there, no doing anything. I do all of my graphics intensive stuff on Windows (I dual-boot Windows and play games there; everything else is Arch).

`nouveau.runpm=0`

actually seems to work for now, but I've just started testing it.

Why do these things happen? Does *everyone* with an Optimus laptop have these problems?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,404

Re: Arch freezes [seemingly] at random after login via SDDM

No depends on your graphics card "older" (pre 1000) series GPUs often work "okay" sometimes nouveau generally breaks. Bugs with using the dedicated graphics while on battery could be firmware issues with your specific firmware.

Newer Turing GPUs do have full offloading/power save support in the latest driver that should hopefully makes these issues a thing of the past (granted you actually  want to use nvidia as opposed to nouveau)

There are also quite a few Optimus systems that don't depend on the dedicated graphics card for external screens, that often helps quite a bit.