Manjaro not outputing to display properly

Support
1

Hi folks, I have a rather odd problem today.

I went to get myself a cup of tea and the computer locked locked itself as it usually does. Upon entering my password I noticed no change on the display. At first I thought my display was acting up so I turned it off and on again and it displayed an updated image, however that image was a still.

Apparently, Manjaro will currently not provide the display with an active output, it will only display the latest image every time I turn the monitor off and then back on again.

I rebooted a couple of times with no change, then finally into Windows to confirm that there was no problem with the GPU itself even though the computer was booting and posting normally and indeed, Windows ran normally.

Eventually I managed to get into virtual shell by pressing CTRL + ALT + F3 were peculiarly the picture was being updated, but on a repeating pattern of around 1 second of blank screen followed by around 100ms of displaying the correct image output.

I tried to run pacman -Syu in hopes that the system would unbork itself through an update, but unfortunately no such luck as it remains in the same state. To be clear it updated successfully but that did not affect the problem

As you can probably tell, fixing a system which doesn’t want to be seen is a bit difficult.

Thank you for your help!

OS: Manjaro 20.3 Gnome

Harware:

CPU: I5 2500K
MBO: Asus P8P67 M-PRO
GPU: AMD RX580
Ram: 12GB DDR3

2

The problem now appears to surface even when I live boot from a stick.
I planned on simply re-installing Manjaro but it seems even that will be of no help.

I should add that my monitor and my GPU seem to be arguing sometimes, including in Linux Mint. However nowhere does this issue of the system being completely unresponsive occur other than in Manjaro.

In Mint it sometimes doesn’t display an image until turning the monitor on and off again, but then continues on normally. The same sometimes albeit rarely happens on Windows.

The mouse cursor is visible and active in Manjaro, but the rest of the system is not.

I’m going to try a different HDMI cable today or tomorrow because this one is a cheap one that casually picks up RF interference, but since I can see the mouse cursor I’m afraid it isn’t that.

3

Sorry for writing multiple replies but I think it’s important enough to do it.

Ladies and gentlemen, it was the HDMI.
I put in a decent RF shielded HDMI cable and all of the problems are now gone.

By far one of the weirdest problems I’ve ever had. I wonder what was exactly going on under the hood, was the non shielded HDMI picking up signals and they ended up in the GPU effectively confusing the living hell out of the drivers or what?

I will keep you in the loop if any further problems arise.