Screen randomly wakes up from standby / energy saving mode

[inkbottle]

*Intro:*

My screen randomly wakes up from standby / energy saving mode and it's a very
very very annoying issue which cause I unfortunately have not the faintest
clue about.

It is not something I can reproduce, so the best I can do is a sort of "case
report".

*What happened:*

The screen woke up from energy saving mode all by itself.
I just had done an upgrade, so the system was up to date.
I had rebooted twice.

The screen initially went in energy saving mode from sddm: there were no
active session. I think there even have been no session between last reboot
and screen-standby.

Nobody was near the computer, and there was no earthquake at that time, nor
any source of vibrations (note that I did try with mouses unplugged and that
it made no difference).

I took note of the time on my phone.
When later I looked into "journalctl -a", there was no recorded events around
the time of the incident. Not a line has been written in journalctl at or
around that time. (My journalctl is on keep everything forever mode.)

*The general setting:*

It is an external screen connected to a lid-closed laptop through display port
(Lenovo x230, intel integrated gpu; Monitor is 4K Dell; Connection is Display
Port).

I don't see anything else specific about it. I try never to do anything fancy
with admin.

*Why is it so annoying:*

It is a huge distraction when the screen is turning on all by itself randomly.

Due to the settings described above, I cannot turn the screen off using the
physical button.

My primary screen is the external screen. The lid of the laptop being closed,
the screen of the laptop is altogether deactivated.

This is the configuration recorded in settings and it works well.

Now if I turn the external display off with the physical button:
The above configuration is becoming unrealistic.
Consequently the system has to go to a default realistic configuration, which
it does very well: The laptop's screen becomes the primary display...
But that changes all the settings.

And since there is no different settings for different screens configurations,
my settings are necessarily just ditched away.

It would be too long to describe all the settings that are lost during this
phase.

With a 4K monitor on a 3rd generation i5, the gpu is already to the limit of
what it can do. I "could" keep the lid of the laptop open, and the laptop
screen not disabled, etc. But that would take more place on my desk, put
additional strain on the system.

As a consequence of all that, all I can do is turn the computer off.
And with the lid closed and all that, the whole sequence is something very
difficult to do.

[Daniel Schröter]

inkbottle schrieb am Mittwoch, 26. Februar 2020 um 17:20:03 UTC+1:
> My screen randomly wakes up from standby

I have the same problem. It seems to happen since one oft the last upgrades. I'm running KDE from unstable (5.20.5).

One monitor went to sleep (and stands there) fine. The other monitor wakes up every minute. No logs in journalctl or dbus-monitor.

I also tried it with a new profile (other user). I already replaced the displayport cable.

In sddm it works fine. But if I start "real" KDE it wakes up every minute randomly.

If I do
xrandr --output DP-1 --off
the monitor went to sleep and stays in sleep mode. After KDE(?) sends sleep to the monitor (after 10 minutes inactivity) the problematic monitor wakes up from sleep again :-(

Any ideas to debug this?

Bye

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Daniel,

Which GPU are you using?

With AMDs this is a known problem and ignored since years by upstream developers.

Best

Norbert
--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Fujitsu Research Labs + IFMGA ProGuide + TU Wien + TeX Live + Debian Dev
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13


Mar 20, 2021 21:06:15 Daniel Schröter <zwier...@hotmail.com>:

[Daniel Schröter]

Hello Norbert,

Norbert Preining schrieb am Samstag, 20. März 2021 um 13:30:03 UTC+1:
> Which GPU are you using?

It's not an AMD GPU. Old onboard Intel
# inxi -G
Graphics: Device-1: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics driver: i915
v: kernel
Display: server: X.org 1.20.10 driver: loaded: modesetting tty: 103x55
Message: Advanced graphics data unavailable in console for root.
# lsgpu
sys:/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card0
subsystem : drm
drm card : /dev/dri/card0
parent : sys:/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0

sys:/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/renderD128
subsystem : drm
drm render : /dev/dri/renderD128
parent : sys:/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0

sys:/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
subsystem : pci
drm card : /dev/dri/card0
drm render : /dev/dri/renderD128
vendor : 8086
device : 0412
# lscpu |grep "Model name"
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz

As mentioned already it has been working in the past and just occurs if KDE has been loaded.

Bye

[inkbottle]

Your analysis of KDE waking up the monitor by sending a sleep signal is
interesting. (I don't know how you figured that out.)

At one point I understood that `dpms` was buggy. That `kwin` had difficulties
communicating with `dmps` for intrinsic reasons, and that it will never be
fixed anyway, nor even investigated, because `xorg` isn't developed any longer.
I don't remember what exactly made me believe that in the first place.

Consequently I endeavored to see what could be done with `wayland`.

I found out that a command that shows how the kernel see the monitor,
`drm_info`, invariably returns correct information, unless `kwin` is running,
in which case those data became preposterous, wrong. Just as if it is the
whole `kwin` stake that might have issues. Again it is the layman view, I'm
probably completely mistaken. However it does work quite all right with gnome/
wayland if I remember correctly.

Here, what I found about that at the time:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404092
(I'm not sure nobody ever read what I wrote. They must have a lot on their
plate.)

At one point I did use that sort of command:
`while true; do xset dpms 10 10 10; sleep 10; xset dpms force off; sleep 600;
done`

But it wasn't working very well neither, as if something was messing around
with it in the background, and even though it did seem bullet proof, the
monitor always manage to wake up now and then, only for a short time, which
was resulting in a sort of very slow flickering, not sure it's good for the
monitor.

Sooo, what I do now: I turn the computer off!

Oh, yes, turning the monitor off wouldn't do it, it would put such a mess, it'd
take me like 30 min, to fix it when turning it back on.


>
> Bye

[Booksworm]

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