Arch Linux

Suarch

Member

Registered: 2021-12-03

Posts: 1

Tablet Display Problems

Hey everyone,

Problem:
Having display issues on a tablet computer, the screen goes blank despite the screen being physically on and plugged in.

Occurrences:
This problem can sometimes happen when booting into Arch but not most of the time. This happens much more frequently when the screen is turned off and back on. For example, running the command

systemctl suspend

will put the computer to sleep successfully. When the tablet is awoken, the display flashes briefly and then goes blank. Another example is when

vbetool dpms off

and

vbetool dpms on

are run. This produces the same result. This is all from running in a TTY, not in a desktop environment or windows manager (although the result is the same). The tablet is still on and functioning despite not having an active display. For example I can blindly type a command to reboot and the machine does so. If I activate it ahead of time, I can also ssh into the machine despite the screen being blank. The tablet is using Intel graphics (Intel HD Graphics 620). I can also pass the kernel parameter

nomodeset

to disable the i915 graphics. I can put the system to sleep, the screen will still be on with a cursor in the top left corner. When I wake it up, it wakes up no problem.

Attempts to Fix:
Per the wiki, I have early KMS enabled in my mkinitcpio via adding the i915 module. If I don't do this, the screen usually goes blank when the system decides to switch to the i915 module. Despite this, it doesn't seem to help the screen blanking issue when the system is put to sleep. Another fix I've tried is hopping between different current official Arch kernels. Tried vanilla, hardened, lts and zen. Unfortunately, this didn't resolve the issue. For now I am sticking with the vanilla kernel. Per recommendation of the wiki, I uninstalled the xf86-video-intel package and only have the MESA package installed. I've tried looking for errors in journalctl (-k and -b) but I generally don't see errors that explicitly involve i915.

Oddities:
If I input the following kernel parameters into GRUB

initcall_debug no_console_suspend ignore_loglevel

and put the system to sleep, I have a pretty good chance of waking up the tablet successfully, although it's not a guarantee.

I'm a bit at a loss on how to attempt to resolve this issue.