Screen freeze and high CPU for xfwm4

User Support
1

Info:

  • Certified Nova Custom V56 laptop
  • Qubes 4.2.4

Expected Behavior*: No screen freeze

Actual Behavior:
About every (second) day, my screen freezes. Only the pointer of the mouse can move on the screen.
Difficult to predict when it will happen… Among others, it happened when I was watching a film or when I was using Qubes Update.

Workaround:

  1. CTRL + ALT + F2
  2. login
  3. top
  4. Notice that the process xfwm4 has a high CPU
  5. pkill xfwm4 and exit
  6. CTRL + ALT + F1

Consequences after CTRL + ALT + F1:

  • Most of the time: in the system tray, the Network Manager icon from disp-sys-net and the VPN icons from my VPN VMs have disappeared, even if I am successfully able to go on the internet. Killing & restarting those VMs bring back their icons.
  • Sometimes: The system remains frozen and rebooting the laptop seems the only option.

Any idea to fix the problem? Thanks!

2

Are you using modesetting display driver and iris dri module?
If yes, then check in BIOS if dynamic turbo frequency (or equivalent) cpu option is enabled and disable it.

3

Never heard about that, so I guess the answer is: no.

Should we care about such things on a Qubes certified laptop to make it work?

Thanks for your help.

4

I don’t have certified laptop.
I have Thinkpad T14 Gen3 i5 1245U with iGPU.
When I installed QubesOS, for some reason, installer didn’t recognized my Intel Xe gfx and chose to use for Xorg i915 driver. Some other users of T14 reported that they have modesetting by default so I dunno why I had not.

After changing driver from i915 to modesetting I’ve had strange hard crashes.
It happened once a day.
I’ve figured out it was with DRI=iris MESA module (when changed DRI module for i915 driver), which is default and unchangeable with modesetting driver on Intel Xe iGPU.

I’ve lived with it for months and then, last month, I’ve checked something else in BIOS and stumbled upon Dynamic Turbo Frequency settings (typing from memory). It’s windows settings which make turbo dynamic, not fixed at max frequency.
I disabled it, turbo in linux is still dynamic but I have no more hard crashes.

5

Please report this as an issue on github.

Hopefully, one day buggy xfce would be replaced back to KDE.