Screen Freeze After Reboot Following Updates

Support System Updates
1

I am encountering a persistent issue where my screen freezes after rebooting following system updates. This problem has occurred across multiple installations of Manjaro (four in total), including on my main OS, and even after installing Arch Linux. The issue seems to arise after applying updates through the Pacman GUI. No significant change was observed when loading different kenels.

System Information

  • any Arch Linux with gnome
  • ASUS Duo (2024)

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Install Manjaro or Arch Linux on an ASUS Duo laptop
  2. Apply system updates using the Pacman GUI.
  3. Reboot the system.

Behavior

After rebooting, the screen freezes, rendering the system unusable. The behavior is unexpected, it starts either from the initial login screen, upon login, during a random time to one of the displays freezing. There is also sometimes a gray screen after login.

I believe the issue is linked to a recent update in Gnome, which seems to be the trigger for the screen freeze.

I am looking for guidance on how to diagnose the root cause of this issue without the need to install each package one by one. Any advice or troubleshooting tips from the community would be greatly appreciated.

2

There is no such thing as a pacman GUI. pacman is a command-line-only tool. What you are talking about is most likely pamac, which, although compatible with libalpm, is a separate package manager altogether.

Whenever there are bundled updates, the recommended way of updating your system is to completely logout of the GUI, switch over to a tty, log in there, and update the system by way of pacman first (for packages from the official Manjaro repositories), and then with yay or pamac for the AUR stuff afterwards — some of which may need to be rebuilt against the newer libraries.

After rebooting, you should then also take care of properly merging any .pacnew files with their pertinent configuration files. Do not blindly copy the .pacnews over the existing files, but inspect their contents and merge the changes.

You may need to reboot again afterwards, depending on which aspects of the system came with a .pacnew. For instance, if there is a .pacnew for /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, then it would make sense to rebuild your initramfs images after merging, and then reboot so that the new kernel configuration can be loaded.

We strongly recommend that you would subscribe to notifications for the Stable Updates category. Every bundled update comes with a dedicated announcement thread. The first post of that thread lists all of the important changes, and the second post lists all of the potential caveats and how to deal with them.

Lastly, when requesting technical assistance, always provide the necessary technical information. Do not expect us to go look up online what hardware your computer contains.

In your case, the problem is most likely related to your graphics driver, and especially so if you have an Nvidia GPU — I do not know whether you have one or not, but I am also not going to be looking up on whether that is the case; the onus is on you to provide us with information. And with regard to Nvidia specifically, the driver is also highly dependent on the chosen kernel version, so we also need to know what kernel you’re running.

You can find out more about the hardware (and software) in your system by way of the inxi tool. See the man page. :point_down:

man inxi

You may also find useful information in the system logs. :point_down:

man journalctl
1 Like
3

Thank you for your reply.

I merged the .pacnew files and rebuilt initramfs.

I do not have a graphics card, I have an integrated intel graphics, apologize for not mentioning that.

I get the same problem in linux 6.6 and 6.9 except in 6.6 I cannot open a tty. I earlier tried all kernels 6.6 up, including the unstable ones wi the the same issue.

Edit: it appears that 6.9 is suddenly working now, the issue sometimes appears unexpectedly
Edit: just tried loading 6.11, it freezes at gdm half of the time, otherwise I can log in, then randomly, no input is received besides the mouse position. I had system monitor still running but the 2nd display frozen. Tty does not open

I am not sure as to what information exactly to provide. I wanted to report the issue and find out when this might be resolved so I can upgrade my system. For now I will continue to reinstall and delay any updates.

Would appreciate if there is any more advice for troubleshooting this issue. Thanks.

Output of inxi

CPU: 16-core (6-mt/10-st) Intel Core Ultra 9 185H (-MST AMCP-)
speed/min/max: 542/400/4800:5100:3800:2500 MHz Kernel: 6.9.12-3-MANJARO x86_64 Up: 1m
Mem: 2.39/30.71 GiB (7.8%) Storage: 1.16 TiB (1.1% used) Procs: 402 Shell: Zsh inxi: 3.3.35

4

Found the issue, is was the linux-firmware upgrade that breaks it

1 Like
5

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