During normal use screen goes black

bloodlines618 · 2023-11-18 02:34:11

I have been running into an issue for several months and I have been unable to find anything online to help or any logs that shed any light onto what is going on.

During normal use of my laptop the screen will go black, this does not happen in any kind of pattern. It appears to be that the backlight is completely during off because if I am sitting next to a window I can VERY slightly see the screen but even then it is almost impossible to see anything so it could be that things are just so black that only direct sunlight shows them up a little.

So far the only way I have found to sometimes fix this issue is switching to another TTY, however this is not reliable at all, sometimes it works first try, sometimes I need to switch to tty2, then back to tty1 (which is running X11) and do it several times, and sometimes it does not work even after minutes of trying.

Things I tried so far:
using other WMs
using other kernels
using other video drivers
checking the journal logs
checking X11 logs
switching to wayland

None of these fixed anything and the logs show 0 information during the time the screen went black.

The only thing that I have found that has "fixed" it is switching to debian where the issue did not occur. I do have the same setup mirrored on a desktop and this issue does not occur. It is also running AMD GPU as well.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? At this point I have a feeling it is either a driver issue or a kernel issue.

Information on system:
Thinkpad T16 AMD Gen 2
GPU: Radeon 680M
WM: AwesomeWM

Please let me know if there is any additonal information that can be of use.

Edit: One more item of note, this did seem to start after a kernel update. This was a long time ago but I believe it was kernel 4.2 or 5.2 but I cannot remember. It is also way to far back now that rolling back is not an option.

Last edited by bloodlines618 (2023-11-18 02:41:08)

seth · 2023-11-18 08:44:30

Did you check whether it /is/ the backlight, eg. by changing that w/ the keyboard keys?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Backlight

The cause could be some power management daemon and you may also try whether dpms triggers this ("xset dpms force off", any keyboard/mouse/quatschpad interaction will break the DPMS and *should* reactivate the backlight, but possibly won't)

bloodlines618 · 2023-11-18 08:52:08

That was something I did forget to note. I have tried using brightness control when it occurs and no change happens.

I do have a power managment daemon so I will try turning it off and see what happens. Though my lockscreen does not trigger which it is set to when it would go into timeout/sleep.

Last edited by bloodlines618 (2023-11-18 08:53:27)

Arch Linux

#1 2023-11-18 02:34:11

During normal use screen goes black

#2 2023-11-18 08:44:30

Re: During normal use screen goes black

#3 2023-11-18 08:52:08

Re: During normal use screen goes black

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