Frequent random blank screens require reboot

User Support 4.1
#1

Since I’ve installed Qubes OS (couple of weeks) I’ve been experiencing frequent and random blank screens that require a reboot to get the system back up and running again. Sometimes the display flickers showing blank / bright pink screens, some other times it suddenly just becomes blank.

Other OSs do not have any issue of this kind.

The system load doesn’t seem to make a difference since these episodes happen whether I’m running 10 qubes or just one browser tab. RAM shouldn’t be a problem with 32GB.

I do have an NVIDIA gpu but I don’t care about using it.

I tested with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset" added to grub settings but the issue still occurs.

Any idea how I could diagnose this problem, or better yet, solve it?

Thank you

#2

Does installing kernel-latest in dom0 solve the problem? What about disabling the NVIDIA GPU in the firmware? nomodeset is a bad idea and could cause lots of problems, so I suggest undoing that. You might also want to remove quiet to get better logging.

#3

Since the screen is flickering, maybe kernel parameter i915.enable_psr=0 can help? I’ve been suggested to add parameters after the word quiet

#4

Thank you both for the suggestions. Sorry for getting back to you so late but I wanted to test these thoroughly.

After installing kernel-latest in dom0 and enabling the suggested parameter, I did still experience random heavy flickering, but the screen didn’t blank permanently, so I managed to get back to what I was doing within ~10 seconds or so. This doesn’t necessarily mean the problem is solved unfortunately.

I did that

I edited the value of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to splash nouveau.modeset=0 then created /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf with the following content:

blacklist nouveau
options nouveau nomodeset=0

and finally ran mkinitrd.

Also just found this thread that may be related:

Nouvaeu GPU Lockup & Driver Installation