Blank windows, decoration only, when running lots of windows

I have a 4x4k (3840x2160) workstation with a radeon card, 3x DP and 1x HDMI. Usually everything works fine, but since adding another AppVM which runs many windows I’m having an intermittent issue whereby opening a new window (new browser instance in a running VM, launching a new dispVM, etc) results in a blank UI with only the window decoration showing. My first guess is some sort of graphics memory exhaustion. Dom0 has 4GB of RAM allocated with free showing 1GB availalbe. Graphics card is Radeon RX 7600 with 8GB. System ram is 96GB.

Is there anything I can do to boost the memory allocated to graphics?

On a browser window, the right click menu displays as usual but no other visual elements. Resource exhaustion seems to be confirmed because when I shut down the window heavy AppVM I can launch windows in the other AppVMs normally again.

Try setting gui-videoram-min to… a lot. At least 29362.

qvm-features dom0 gui-videoram-min 29362

Then reboot.

Thanks. Also going to update the grub defaults to request 8GB RAM for dom0 instead of the default 4GB.

Did both of these and it hasn’t solved the problem, still reproducible, with excess windows/resource usage within one qube able to DoS other qubes from opening new windows.

Can you provide a screenshot of the issue?

Weirdly, closing some of the windows in the resource heavy VM, then opening them again, and I’m not seeing the problem on the other AppVMs any more. Will take a screenshot next time it occurs, but basically every new window (browser, new dispVM, whatever) just has its colored window decoration an a blank background, no normal UI elements. But the browser process still runs, and right clicking somewhere pops the menu up.

Issue just re-occurred but taking a screenshot failed. (Should have thought to use the analog hole.)

Notably the heavy use VM was experiencing disk input/output errors and memory issues and had to be shut down. Shutting it down again solved the problems in other AppVMs.

This sounds like a bigger issue tbh, and possibly a root cause for the black screen?

Yes, are you able to help me debug this. It’s a recurring issue on this machine where sometimes an AppVM will start misbehaving and the cause seems to be I/O errors (touch filename returns an error). The VM must then be restarted. I’ve not discerned any pattern here.

Once that error happens, could you run sudo journalctl -b on that AppVM and dom0 and attach the outputs here?

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Jan 04 19:23:03 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: XGetWindowAttributes for 0x1802a68 failed in handle_create, ret=0x0
Jan 04 19:23:38 personal-files systemd[1]: Unmounting efi.mount - EFI System Partition Automount...
Jan 04 19:23:38 personal-files systemd[1]: efi.mount: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 04 19:23:38 personal-files systemd[1]: Unmounted efi.mount - EFI System Partition Automount.
Jan 04 19:23:59 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: WARNING handle_focus: FocusIn: Window 0x180346e data not initialized
Jan 04 19:24:01 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: XGetWindowAttributes for 0x180358c failed in handle_create, ret=0x0
Jan 04 19:25:01 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: WARNING handle_focus: FocusIn: Window 0x1801dc1 data not initialized
Jan 04 19:25:20 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: XGetWindowAttributes for 0x1802077 failed in handle_create, ret=0x0
**Jan 04 19:25:31 personal-files kernel: I/O error, dev xvdb, sector 2164376 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x9800 phys_seg 11 prio class 2**
**Jan 04 19:25:31 personal-files kernel: Aborting journal on device xvdb-8.**
**Jan 04 19:25:31 personal-files kernel: EXT4-fs error (device xvdb): ext4_journal_check_start:84: comm kolourpaint: Detected aborted journal**
**Jan 04 19:25:31 personal-files kernel: EXT4-fs (xvdb): Remounting filesystem read-only**
Jan 04 19:25:50 personal-files systemd[945]: Started vte-spawn-4084f454-9bec-4264-9abd-92eda1eff3ce.scope - VTE child process 1528 launched by org.gnome.Terminal process 1351.
Jan 04 19:26:03 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: WARNING handle_focus: FocusIn: Window 0x1800007 data not initialized
Jan 04 19:26:03 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: XGetWindowAttributes for 0x180001d failed in handle_create, ret=0x0
Jan 04 19:26:20 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: WARNING handle_focus: FocusIn: Window 0x1800007 data not initialized
Jan 04 19:26:20 personal-files qubes-gui[936]: XGetWindowAttributes for 0x1800020 failed in handle_create, ret=0x0
Jan 04 19:26:39 personal-files systemd[945]: Started vte-spawn-abe0abcb-34c7-4916-9f36-9df2985dfb24.scope - VTE child process 1556 launched by org.gnome.Terminal process 1351.
Jan 04 19:26:41 personal-files systemd[1]: Starting qubes-update-check.service - Qubes check for VM updates and notify dom0...
Jan 04 19:26:41 personal-files upgrades-status-notify[1560]: Ign:1 https://deb.debian.org/debian trixie InRelease
Jan 04 19:26:41 personal-files upgrades-status-notify[1560]: Ign:2 https://deb.qubes-os.org/r4.2/vm trixie InRelease
Jan 04 19:26:41 personal-files upgrades-status-notify[1560]: Ign:3 https://deb.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security InRelease
Jan 04 19:26:42 personal-files upgrades-status-notify[1560]: Ign:3 https://deb.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security InRelease
Jan 04 19:26:42 personal-files upgrades-status-notify[1560]: Ign:2 https://deb.qubes-os.org/r4.2/vm trixie InRelease
Jan 04 19:26:42 personal-files upgrades-status-notify[1560]: Ign:1 https://deb.debian.org/debian trixie InRelease
Jan 04 19:26:43 personal-files sudo[1565]:     user : TTY=pts/3 ; PWD=/home/user ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/journalctl -b
Jan 04 19:26:43 personal-files sudo[1565]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root(uid=0) by user(uid=1000)

dmesg

[  276.965869] I/O error, dev xvdb, sector 2164376 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x9800 phys_seg 11 prio class 2
[  276.965956] Aborting journal on device xvdb-8.
[  276.969019] EXT4-fs error (device xvdb): ext4_journal_check_start:84: comm kolourpaint: Detected aborted journal
[  276.970238] EXT4-fs (xvdb): Remounting filesystem read-only