Hey everyone,
I am having an issue that appears to be totally at random, and it is exactly as the title states. My display will suddenly look like a black and white kaleidoscope, or/and sometimes it will all suck to the middle of the screen and go black like it just got sucked into a black hole. This has happened 4 times and none of which have been while gaming. The 3rd time was yesterday after I ran an Octopi update, and the 4th was today when I tried to open Discord. When it goes black after the crazy void sucking, I still have a mouse pointer. If it kaleidoscoped, the pointer is gone as with everything else, but the kaleidoscope rapidly changes when I try and move the mouse. The only way I can solve the issue is to hard shut down my PC and boot it back up. Once it is back up, everything is fine. I am afraid that this issue might cause damage to my hardware, and at the very least it is incredibly inconvenient.
I have checked my display wire connection, and it is secure. Looking at GWE, my graphics card never exceeds 43c. Critical is at 93c so plenty of headroom there, and my fans haven't even kicked on so I don't think overheating is an issue.
As far as I can tell, everything seems to be fine, but I am still very new to Linux/Garuda; so I could easily be missing something. I tried looking around online, and have found basically nothing. Any help would be greatly appreciated, even if it is just a link to something.
I actually do not have any games installed on it currently other than whatever came native to Garuda. This is basically a brand new build.
The only changes I have made is updates. I previously had an issue with it black screening after start up, but after running update it corrected the issue. The 3rd time it happened was immediately after Octopi updated yesterday. I got a notification stating there were 21 updates. I ran the update. it went fine. Clicked the x to close the window, and the whole display broke.
Is it possible that it is a graphics driver issue? The only way I can find to check on my GPU and manipulate it at all is with GWE, but it doesn't have any way to update drivers. Just tells me the current driver.
I have not overclocked, and to be totally honest, wouldn't even know how to without researching it. As long as it handles the games I want to play, I don't see much point in overclocking.
I would probably have to go back to right after the initial install, but that is okay because I don't have much else on here. Please don't judge me to much for this, but how do I access the snapshots? I see something in the assistant called Snapper, but it only goes back to Nov 11, which I have this built and running for at least a month.
I’ve had very similar issue a few times, but I’ve not bothered to investigate/diagnose yet (and thus not made a dedicated post).
FWIW, at least a couple of times Kodi has been involved, but I can’t be sure it’s always been running for all instances.
Running Radeon graphics.
I did just run another update and it had 9 packages to update. Nothing has broken yet so that a good sign I suppose.
The weirdest thing about this issue is that it seems to be, for the most part, completely random. The only thing that seems consistent is that it happens when I am trying to open or close a window (closing the Octopi update window, or opening discord).
It kind of sounds like the compositor is crashing, or it's a regression in Xorg. The recent Xorg 21.1 update seems to have created issues for a decent number of people...
Is there a way for me to fix the issue? It has happened to me 2 more times in the past few days. The first time was after an update got done running in the background, and the second was after I had downloaded a file and went to close the window. Both times involved me manipulating a window in some way; either closing or minimizing.
If it only started happening recently then it's either a regression (likely in the kernel, Xorg, or MESA) or a hardware failure.
A regression in the kernel can be narrowed down by trying other kernels (e.g. linux and linux-lts), and in general a regression will addressed by future updates. A hardware failure is more difficult to diagnose.
Hmm, maybe doing video memory test with cuda_memtest (or something similar) would be a way to see if faulty hardware is causing the graphical artifacts?
Thanks for the advice. I am still SUPER green when it comes to all things linux, so I will need to look into both of those. I'm going to look into the cuda_memtest first because if it is a hardware issue, I need to get that figured out before any warranty expire.
If I change kernels, will that effect anything major? I don't want to cause any issues with future updates.
Changing kernels shouldn't effect anything major in a negative way. Just keep Zen installed, install another stable one, and change your kernel when booting up under the Advanced Boot Options. I change kernels frequently using the boot-up options, and I never had any long standing issues that would be caused by jumping to one kernel to the next. Also, having a stable kernel (like LTS) is a good thing to have Just in case a version of Zen doesn't like your hardware setup. Think of it as a "backup plan" or a troubleshooting option.
Maximizing Kodi and quickly clicking to play a video caused it to bug out... system freezes, though mouse cursor is responsive for a few seconds (though desktop unresponsive to it (and cursor doesn't change to different styles as should (resize cursor etc)) then screen flickers once, then goes off (monitor enter sleep) for a couple seconds, then get ^^^^ displayed before blank screen and back to ^^^ during which time the video started playing in the background (heard the audio) before also stopping (though I've had it where the audio bugger loops).
