Bug 682528

Summary:	Hard freeze of system, seems to be related to display brightness switching.
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.4	Reporter:	Neil Rickert <nwr10cst-oslnx>
Component:	Kernel	Assignee:	Egbert Eich <eich>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Critical
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	alex.trevisol, jeffm
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	64bit
OS:	openSUSE 11.4
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	765336

Description Neil Rickert 2011-03-25 03:12:13 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0

System is a Dell Inspiron N5010 laptop with Intel Arrandale / Ironlake graphics (uses i915 driver).  Desktop effects are turned off.

With normal active use, everything is fine.  But when I let it sit idle for a while, and return to it, I sometimes find it is frozen (no activity, does not respond to ping over the network, requires power off to regain control).


Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
System is set at about 50% brightness (I like it that way).  The default settings further dim the screen after around 10 minutes of inactivity.  If I do something, such as move the mouse, when in that dimmed state, it sometimes brightens to the normal brightness and then instantly freezes.  (I have currently turned off that dimming, to reduce the frequency of the problem).



There is a forum thread at http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/laptop/456110-system-freeze-possible-diagnosis.html

Partial output from "lspci -nnk":

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integ
rated Graphics Controller [8086:0046] (rev 18)
        Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0447]
        Kernel driver in use: i915

Comment 1 Jeff Mahoney 2011-04-15 19:09:12 UTC

From the forums, booting with nomodeset works around the issue

-> drm

Comment 2 Neil Rickert 2011-04-15 21:06:27 UTC

Yes, I am currently booting with nomodeset to work around this, although it is not the best situation.

If you are able to pass this upstream to whoever maintains the driver, that would be appreciated.  Hopefully, it will work correctly in some future version.

Comment 3 Alex Trevisol 2011-11-17 16:01:46 UTC

Hi,

I have same problem in the final version 12.1 on both x86 and x64 versions

Comment 4 Neil Rickert 2011-11-18 04:56:33 UTC

Yes, I still see the problem with 12.1.  I am doing my best to live with it.  If forced, I can revert to "nomodeset", but then the screen looks crappy and the aspect ratio is wrong.

I have played with setting the timings in power settings, to allow a long period before it tries to dim the screen.  That seems to help, but does not completely solve the problem.

Comment 5 Jeff Mahoney 2012-08-02 15:54:01 UTC

With the coming release of openSUSE 12.2, openSUSE kernel developers are focusing their efforts there. Reports against openSUSE 11.4 and prior will not get the attention needed to resolve them before openSUSE 12.2 is release and openSUSE 11.4 becomes unmaintained.

Please re-test with openSUSE 12.1 or openSUSE RC2+ and re-open with an updated Product if you still encounter your issue.

We apologize for this issue not getting the attention it deserves but we are focusing our resources in the area where they will have the most impact for our users.  We're working hard to make openSUSE 12.2 the best openSUSE release yet!

Comment 6 Neil Rickert 2012-08-03 17:25:50 UTC

An update for 12.2.

I have been occasionally seeing this problem with 12.2, though it has been less frequent.

There was an update to 12.2 RC1 around 2 weeks ago that include an update for the Intel graphics driver.  I have not had any problems since then.  It is too early to say that the problem is solved, and I have not tried stress-testing (frequent brightness changes).  However, I am hopeful that I will rarely see this problem with 12.2 final.