i915 laptop screen turning Off and back On

R

rmomota

Hi,
I think I already started a thread few years ago reporting this and after several system updates the issue persist.
This happens few times but it's annoying because I sometimes get no image for more than 10 seconds.
The system boots just fine, I login and everything starts normally.
After some minutes, there's no fixed amount of minutes, it just happens randomly the laptop screen turns off, stays off for several seconds, sometimes 5 sometimes 10 seconds and turns back on.
It happens when the laptop is plugged to power but seems to happen often when laptop is running on battery, so it seems it may be related with power management profiles.
It doesn't happen to external displays, only the laptop display and if I'm typing while the screen is Off the text is there.

It's a HP Elitebook 840 G1
It's annoying because it interrupts whatever I'm doing.
Any ideias?

Thanks.
 
Is this happening only when you typing?

One of my collogues have a similar issue with it's laptop and it turns out that he have a watch with magnetic wrist band which activating the laptop LID sensor and the display turns off.

You may check your hardware. For a test enter inside the BIOS/UEFI and leave the laptop for a while there so there's no any OS/Software related programs if the laptop screen turns off while it's inside the BIOS then you have a hardware issue.

Is the display completely black or only the backlight is off?
 
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rmomota said:
It's a HP Elitebook 840 G1
Click to expand...
Have you checked for a broken display cable at the hinge mechanism? It's a pretty common failure mode for HP laptops... (HP stands for "Hinge Problems")

By default there is no power management enabled. Check the dmesg output and if it just shows the screen disappearing/reappearing my bet would be a broken cable (or loose connector if you are lucky)
 
rmomota said:
After some minutes, there's no fixed amount of minutes, it just happens randomly the laptop screen turns off, stays off for several seconds, sometimes 5 sometimes 10 seconds and turns back on.
Click to expand...
dmesg might say something about a GPU reset

I'd try this in loader.conf:
Code: 
hw.i915kms.modeset="1"
hw.i915kms.nuclear_pageflip="1"
hw.i915kms.fastboot="1"
hw.i915kms.enable_psr="0"
hw.i915kms.enable_psr2_sel_fetch="0"
hw.i915kms.panel_use_ssc="0"
hw.i915kms.enable_ips="0"
hw.i915kms.enable_fbc="0"
hw.i915kms.enable_dc="0"
hw.i915kms.disable_power_well="0"
hw.i915kms.enable_guc="0"
hw.i915kms.guc_log_level="0"
hw.i915kms.verbose_state_checks="0"
hw.i915kms.error_capture="0"
hw.i915kms.request_timeout_ms="200000"
hw.i915kms.enable_hangcheck="0"
 
I don't know HP laptops. However, it sounds like it can't be a dodgy lid close suspend switch, since the system stays up. It sounds more like a hardware problem than software though, since it seems to happen at random. Is it related to heat at all, eg does it happen when the fan is on or case is hot?

A few things to check...
1. is there any kind of screen blanking after a time interval set in the desktop settings, or possibly even in the bios?
2. if you run a different operating system from a live usb stick as a sanity check, do you still see the problem?

If you think it might be hardware...
1. try reseating the screen signal cable connector
2. could it be a break in the screen signal cable
3. same as (2) and (3) but for the screen power cable

Try this video
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCU7zolCfok
 
blackbird9 said:
2. if you run a different operating system from a live usb stick as a sanity check, do you still see the problem?
Click to expand...
It happens with Linux too, doesn't happen with Windows.
I've another HP Laptop, same behavior, so it's not the hardware or a lid switch issue so that point to drivers.
It may happen in just a couple of minutes since started, it can take hours to happen again no matter if it's doing some heavy processing or not if it's cold or hot.
But it can be something related to ambience auto screen brightness or power profiles, it makes sense to happen while plugged and often on battery mode, laptops saves power by reducing brightness and that instruction may be causing this interruption.
There may be a way to disable the ambience light sensor, that tiny dot beside the integrated camera.
That sensor probably sends a signal to the system and the system does not recognize it.
 
Can't be hardware if it works with windows then. Strange bug! You could try sticking some masking tape over the light sensor, just to see if that fixes it.
 
It works with windows because it runs official hp drivers
blackbird9 said:
sticking some masking tape over the light sensor
Click to expand...
that seems to be a excellent idea
it may reduce but not resolve as in battery mode dimming the screen brightness does not depend on that sensor only but also battery saving profile.
 
rmomota said:
can I ask where did you get those settings?
Click to expand...
Myself :cool: (I disable all power-saving Intel GPUs, similar settings on Linux)
rmomota said:
did it work to some case like this?
Click to expand...
I'm thinking it's PSR or FBC (heard reports about that Haswell), but it might be a good idea to not have the rest of that be a potential cause
rmomota said:
not yet, I've to make sure I have a boot pendrive ready just in case.
Click to expand...
I'd disable auto-load i915kms, add to loader.conf, reboot to TTY (no graphical/LightDM), log-in as root, then kldload i915kms (if it loads it'll accept the settings)

If it crashes, reboot and back into root, remove loader.conf changes, re-add i915kms to auto-load (kld_list+= i915kms), then it's back to previous state
 
Which DE, rmomota ? Is it the in-built display or external display?

I had/ve a blinking issue with an external monitor...and it could point at an aging external monitor circuitry as capacitors dry out over time.
 
Espionage724 said:
Did you try adding all that stuff in loader.conf?
Click to expand...
hw.i915kms.modeset="1"
is a discontinued option and I had to remove
hw.i915kms.nuclear_pageflip="1"
which distorts the screen graphics, chunky image, diagonal lines from nowhere and missing font parts, weird rgb colored blocks

seems fine until now

UPDATE:
Graphics at SDDM keeps showing distorted even after disabling that option but restarting SDDM seems to fix it.
Enabled that nuclear_pageflip again.
Now the issue resides in SDDM, why it gets distorted and gets OK after service restart.
 
rmomota said:
It happens with Linux too
Click to expand...
Sounds like the issue originates in the Linux DRM driver. As FreeBSD's DRM driver is a direct port of that Linux DRM driver I suspect the bug found its way into the FreeBSD's driver too. What version of DRM (on Linux and on FreeBSD)?
 
Found that distortion was caused by the very last option:
hw.i915kms.enable_hangcheck="0"

after disabling that option seems, until now, that distortion at boot sddm never came back.
sometimes was more than a distortion, sometimes system got unresponsive until kernel panic

Now that I got these settings at boot I must observe if the turning off screen issue got resolved.
 
I ended up removing all those settings again as my hyprland vm with a vnc maximized window crashes the hyprland session.
I never had hyprland crashing before.
 
rmomota said:
Hi,
I think I already started a thread few years ago reporting this and after several system updates the issue persist.
This happens few times but it's annoying because I sometimes get no image for more than 10 seconds.
The system boots just fine, I login and everything starts normally.
After some minutes, there's no fixed amount of minutes, it just happens randomly the laptop screen turns off, stays off for several seconds, sometimes 5 sometimes 10 seconds and turns back on.
It happens when the laptop is plugged to power but seems to happen often when laptop is running on battery, so it seems it may be related with power management profiles.
It doesn't happen to external displays, only the laptop display and if I'm typing while the screen is Off the text is there.

It's a HP Elitebook 840 G1
It's annoying because it interrupts whatever I'm doing.
Any ideias?

Thanks.
Click to expand...
I have an HP 840 G5 in an HP 840 base station:

What drm-*-kmod is being used?

My experience has been that drm-66-kmod on 16-CURRENT is rock solid.

drm-612-kmod will either hang with a blank screen or panic under specific circumstances.
 
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