Dell XPS 9500 random display freeze

[daowanijo]

Hmm okay not any issue there.

What is output of this: mhwd -li
Also, can you check your BIOS / UEFI settings to see if there is a disable for Panel Self Refresh?

[jacky-rohr]

Output:

video-linux            2018.05.04                true            PCI

I check bios about Panel Self Refresh before. No option :-/

[daowanijo]

Should see:

video-modesetting            2020.01.13                true            PCI
video-hybrid-intel-nvidia-prime            2021.07.28               false            PCI

video-linux is the open source driver. This means it is not using the proprietary one.

You should be able to one-click install and activate the proprietary one with mhwd GUI utility called
“Hardware Configuration”

[jacky-rohr]

I reinstalled Manjaro, but this time the gnome edition. I switch kernel to 5.10. Output of mhwd -li now looks the same as yours.

[jacky-rohr]

I found this for Panel Self Refresh and tried it on Pop_OS. Didn’t help.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dell_XPS_13_(9350)#Panel_Self_Refresh

[daowanijo]

Let us know if it crashes again on Gnome with 5.10LTS + Proprietary driver.

[jacky-rohr]

Just happend again
journalctl shows no entry for the current time. Last entry was more than 20 min ago.
mhwd -li hasn’t changed. Looks the same.
The issue was as usual. Watching a video on Youtube and out of a sudden it freezed and I had to lock the screen.
It’s weird because there was no issue since I reinstalled Manjaro today noon.

[jacky-rohr]

And again. Even with the psr parameter in grub.
I guess I have to get rid of this laptop

[jacky-rohr]

Hello,
After a couple of days without any freeze at all I wanted to share what I did.
After Manjaro I tried pure Debian but, guess what, it happend also there. With NVidia drivers and without.

After some research about the Panel Self Refresh issue I noticed that I probably failed to do it right on linux. Which is to set the i915.enable_psr=0 parameter in the kernel. How to do that depends a bit on the distribution.

After trying it on Debian the freeze didn’t happen anymore. So I’m back on Pop_OS! with the same fix and no freeze since then. In the entire time I’m using this laptop (about 6 months) there was no day without freeze. So I’m pretty sure the problem is gone now.

I haven’t tried it on Arch or Manjaro but I think it should work. I’m mean, I found this solution originally in the Arch documentation. Thanks for that btw.

I hope this helps others. Thank you again for helping me.