Darius 🐆 Jan 28, 2024
Mole

Hey Linux masto, I need some help!

Manjaro's been running great for the past couple of days, but today I'm running into a big issue - on first boot today, the monitor failed to auto-switch to the correct source. It then crashed twice while playing a game that was no problem previously. The next boot after that, the monitor switched back and forth wildly between HDMI (no connection) and DP (where the PC is connected). A struggle later and I get it to boot, but has bad visual artifacts and freezes after several minutes (no response at all, but the artifacting somehow keeps changing)

Now here's the kicker - I boot a live session from USB, and it persists. Photo below. Because the artifacting doesn't turn up on screenshots. What do y'all think is going on?

EDIT: trying Mint from live session now - Mint's live seems to run fine with no issues.

Jan 28, 2024 at 4:37pmWeb
Show threadHexadec 0xJan 28, 2024
@AfterMoles Hey! What is your graphic card?
Show threadDarius 🐆 Jan 28, 2024
@AfterMoles It could be the GPU being silly? Especially if it persists between boots. You could try running sudo dmesg | grep amdgpu from the terminal and see if that coughs up interesting logs.
Show threadLeviJan 28, 2024

@AfterMoles Can't promise I'll be much help as I've never encountered anything like this, but it seems to me that your environment is having trouble assigning your display(s?) their values. Are you on X11 or Wayland?

What does echo $DISPLAY return and does it change over time when it switches back and forth between sources?

One more thing to check is the contents of /sys/class/drm. From StackExchange:

The subdirectories are per-connector, with a name of the form card%d-%s with %d replaced by an index (that I know nothing about) and %s replaced with the connector name.

Five files per device should show up:

• Connection status
• Enabled (or not)
• DPMS state
• Mode list
• EDID

For some devices, you'll get extra information for sub-connectors too.The most important thing to check being the status and enabled files.

This directory is full of symlinks so it's easiest to check it using a graphical file manager like Dolphin.

It may also be useful to compare the results of this with the live boots you mentioned.

/sys/class/drm directory structure

Who is responsible for creating the "/sys/class/drm" directory structure, more specifically the "/sys/class/drm/card0-LVDS-1" directory? I am using kernel-2.6.38 and an nVidia card.

Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
Show threadTi Jan 28, 2024

@AfterMoles
Man, I haven't seen artifacting like that for years. It looks like the driver is screwed up.

When you ran Mint, what version was the mesa driver version? Could be something there.

If you haven't, yet, the Arch wiki has a good page about the AMDGPU driver. You might not be running the correct one....