Arch Linux

grahamas

Member

Registered: 2023-04-03

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Blinking cursor on black screen after reboot

My arch install has been functional for nearly a year, and then today it booted into a black screen with blinking cursor. To my knowledge I didn't do anything crazy (except install texlive so I'm hoping very very strongly I won't have to reinstall)

dmesg: https://dpaste.com/4XKLJUJNW
journal -b -1 (after another reboot): https://dpaste.com/64YRKCVPR
lsmod: https://dpaste.com/E7BGKP54Y
lspci: https://dpaste.com/ENTEYGS8Z
pacman log: https://dpaste.com/33Z6DRBQS

The last time I know I rebooted successfully was March 30, so the March 26 pacman entries should be irrelevant. Also, the 2023-04-02T18:52 pacman entries are from `yay -Syuu` that I ran *after* the black screen failure (as opposed to the ones on April 2 around noon). The only thing that I can find in the pacman log that could be relevant is nvidia upgrading. I'll try downgrading that as a test, but futzing with nvidia and downgrading have historically destroyed things for me.

I also attempted to fix by adding "nomodeset i915.modeset=0 nouveau.modeset=0" with no effect. It occurs to me now that nouveau should be nvidia (or nvidia-drm?) but that seems suuuper sketchy and not a long-term fix.

EDIT: whoops my processor is AMD so apparently nomodeset is a no-no? Anyway, to be clear, I didn't have any nomodesets when the problem first presented.

Last edited by grahamas (2023-04-03 04:05:51)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Blinking cursor on black screen after reboot

Your xorg log (embeded in that journal) clearly shows that the problem is the your xorg video driver and / or it's configuration.  Reinstalling wouldn't help as you'd still need to fix whatever is wrong with your nvidia set up - but I have zero nvidia experience so can't be much help there.

Downgrading nvidia will fail - you need to keep it in sync with the kernel, so you'd have to downgrade both to test / confirm that this is the problem, though that's already clear, so there is no need for such a test.

Last edited by Trilby (2023-04-03 02:56:15)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

grahamas

Member

Registered: 2023-04-03

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Blinking cursor on black screen after reboot

Your xorg log (embeded in that journal) clearly shows that the problem is the your xorg video driver and / or it's configuration.

Thank you! I dug into nvidia's xconfig and found that I just needed to run

# nvidia-xconfig

I have no idea what changed between yesterday and today (my xorg.conf didn't exist, so I guess it got deleted somehow?) but now everything works.

source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA … figuration

Last edited by grahamas (2023-04-03 04:06:50)