Arch Linux

rotwang

Member

Registered: 2024-02-24

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

I just got a Chuwi Minibook X n100 (https://us.chuwi.com/products/minibook-x-n100) because I love a tiny laptop.

----------- Question below, skim this section (just for reference for anyone else with a Chuwi Minibook X) -----------

Mostly installing Arch on it went pretty smoothly, other than the usual hassles of having go through Windows to disable secure boot, and resizing the default too-small Windows UEFI boot partition.

But once I had the system going I started having this severe problem where the screen would appear to be broken: all garbled and the wrong color and only on the bottom half. This would happen about 9 times out of 10 when coming back from suspend, running startx, or even just booting the machine. On start, the grub menu would appear fine, and the garbledy-gook would only happen later in the boot process (presumably when the resolution changed), so it didn't feel like a broken hardware problem to me. As you can imagine, the screen not working 90% of the time when it was turned on makes a mini laptop largely worthless though. To be clear: the system itself was not frozen: I could run blind commands or connect via ssh (I compiled the kernel on it without the screen working).

Some googling showed that this was a known problem with the similar slightly older model, pre-n100 2023 Minibook X. On that model, it seemed most people could work around the problem by running xrandr to turn the screen off and back on, or suspend and resume, or switch to console and back. However on my newer model (2023 n100), the problem seemed more severe. None of those work-arounds worked for me.

It was suggested on the Arch Chuwi Minibook X (2023) documentation page that it was only a problem with certain kernels, so I started trying different kernels. But neither linux-lts nor linux-mainline (AUR) solved the problem.

The issue isn't with just Arch though, it's linux-wide. I read this thread on the Chuwi forum:
https://forum.chuwi.com/t/linux-distro- … /55?page=2

And decided to try the 6.6 kernel, which supposedly worked for at least one other person. I checked out commit 1c5e87b544ebd5d05ba37e4a05801564479c8c82 from linux-mainline and used modprobed-db to configure the modules. And, (so far, knock on wood, fingers crossed) it has worked!

So I'm posting all that above just as reference for anyone else who might find themselves in the same situation as myself.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But I do have a question for the Arch crew (and I guess any general kernel crew): It seems that there was something amiss in the 5.x series kernels that was causing this problem with the garbled screen, and it was fixed in the 6.x series somewhere. But it's back and worse than before in the 6.7 and 6.8 kernels. So does anyone have any idea what is causing it? Or, more specifically, what I should be looking for in future kernel release notes that might indicate this thing is fixed and I can try an up-to-date kernel on my Minibook X again? I don't want to be stuck on 6.6 forever.

Thanks!

Last edited by rotwang (2024-02-26 15:54:31)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,820

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

Generally speaking for fixes in the i915/intel graphics module/suspension issues... If you want to be actively working towards a solution you'd need to do a bisect of the kernel to find the offending commit.

rotwang

Member

Registered: 2024-02-24

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

Right, I see. I should not be assuming the problem will fix itself and help track down the specific commit it went bad. Gotcha!

RisBerry

Member

Registered: 2024-02-25

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

I am also the owner of Chuwi Minibook X (N100), and this is what I found.

After going through several versions of the 6.6.x kernel, I found that in my case the display breaks starting from version 6.6.15.
There were several changes in the i915 drivers between version 6.6.14 and 6.6.15, but I think the most interesting is the commit 6992eb815d087858f8d7e4020529c2fe800456b3, which changes the order of display initialization.

At the moment, I tried to build the 6.7.6 kernel where I rolled back this commit. The display is working so far, but it's only been a few days since I recompiled the kernel.

rotwang

Member

Registered: 2024-02-24

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

Awesome! Thanks for confirming my suspicions and tracking the problem much further than I did.

To be clear for anyone else who might come across this thread:

- The commit I referred to above (1c5e87b544ebd5d05ba37e4a05801564479c8c82) is from linux-mainline AUR repo for Arch: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/linux-mainline

- RisBerry's commit (6992eb815d087858f8d7e4020529c2fe800456b3) is from the kernel.org repo.

Which also suggests that, since this is in no way an Arch-specific problem, we probably should be having this conversation somewhere that's more kernel-developery.

sonnyp

Member

Registered: 2010-12-29

Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/10334

fdjj

Member

Registered: 2024-03-25

Posts: 1

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

因为完全一样的原因，买了跟楼主完全一样的电脑，装了完全一样的系统，遇到跟楼主完全一样的问题。
不会自己编译内核，想办法换成6.6，屏幕确实好了，其他问题又来了。
有工夫再折腾吧

RisBerry

Member

Registered: 2024-02-25

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Garbled half-screen after resume on Chuwi Minibook X n100

Great news everybody. We finally got 6.8.4 kernel and it includes patch for display initialization. So now display should work out of box without any glitches.