Occasionally (perhaps one in twenty times) when I wake up the machine after the screen has blanked, the display is broken up into disjointed blocks (see the attached image).
This is not only on the KDE/Plasma desktop but also on the text consoles. The only solution that I have found is to switch to a text console and re-boot with Ctrl-Alt-Delete, as logging out (if I can find the menu) or restarting X does not restore the mapping.
System info:
Video Card:
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RS880 [Radeon HD 4250] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. M5A88-V EVO
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 18, NUMA node 0
Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
I/O ports at c000 [size=256]
Memory at fe8f0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at fe700000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [virtual] [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: radeon
Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu
CPU:
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Address sizes: 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 6
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-5
Vendor ID: AuthenticAMD
Model name: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor
Kernel:
6.2.9-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Mar 31 07:15:15 UTC 2023 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Desktop:
Version
=======
KWin version: 5.27.3
Qt Version: 5.15.8
Qt compile version: 5.15.8
XCB compile version: 1.15
Operation Mode: X11 only
Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be?
That looks suspiciously like a hardware problem. Especially since you say it doesn’t happen all the time and only intermittently. Reminds me of a loose connection. I’d say, try one or all of the following (not simultaneously, obviously) and see if that helps:
Replace the cable and test it; alternatively, wiggle the cable at the connector(s) and see what happens.
If that doesn’t make a difference, test with a different monitor and see if that helps.
This would be the most difficult option, I think, but if none of the above worked, try testing with a/a different GPU.
Looks like basic video memory corruption that was common for amd in the past, and since your graphics card is very old and quite rare, maybe it still uses older codepaths that are susceptible to this.
Last time i saw it i was running 7950 before amdgpu support was introduced.
What you can do: first step is to try different kernels.
Thanks for the input.
I don’t think hardware is that likely as if that were the case I would expect at least an occasional glitch in other circumstances than waking up the graphics card.
The problem has been present for some time (years) but this is the first time I’ve remembered to get a camera and take a picture before rebooting, so the old-AMD bug explanation seems likely, but given that I’ve gone through many kernels and it’s affected all or most, I doubt that trying a different kernel will help much (maybe frequency could be reduced, or equally increased).
Both me and @varikonniemi gave you what we think the problem might be.
To know you can do the test(s).
most isn’t all. So it’s another thing you can test.
While I don’t know about it, what it is, or something like that, from the description I’ve read about it in @varikonniemi, it still sounds like hardware. The GPU is hardware, after all.
Just to be clear, i would not expect it to be hardware problem related, but gpu driver related, especially something related to suspend/resume/power management that comes into play when screen powers off.
Only thing i could say at this point is maybe try the 6.3RC kernel.
After that next step would be to catch some errors in system log and forward them to linux kernel mailing list. But from what i remember, when my 7950 had very similar corruption issue, there was nothing in the logs and the errors only stopped when i started using amdgpu. This is unfortunately not an option for you as your card is so old it will not get amdgpu support.
