[mythtv-users] X11 freeze after screen blanking with Haswell mobile

[Karl Newman]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 7:21 AM, Matt Garman <matthew.garman at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I just rebuilt my frontend-only machine using an Intel NUC D54250wyk.
> This uses an i5-4250U CPU, with integrated HD graphics 5000.  My
> understanding is that this is basically a laptop Haswell CPU/GPU.
>
> I'm running CentOS 6.6 and MythTV 0.27.4 from scrpms.  Everything
> works fine except that after the screen blanks due to inactivity,
> about 65% of the time, the screen is completely frozen.
>
> I'm not using any screensaver, just letting Xorg do the blanking.
> When the screen is frozen, I can still move the mouse cursor around.
> But I can't see anything else on the screen.  The workaround is to
> explicitly kill the X server (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace), then re-launch
> mythfrontend.
>
> Another curious thing I've noticed: some of the time, when the screen
> is frozen like this, it's not black, but frozen on a frame (i.e. still
> image) from something we recently watched!  At first I thought it was
> my kids playing with the remote, but we started keeping the remote out
> of their reach, and it's still happening.
>
> A final note: I usually start mythfrontend from a terminal.  Most
> people have noticed, in X, the mouse pointer is a little arrow, but
> when you mouse over a focused terminal window (xterm), then the mouse
> pointer turns into a cursor (looks kind of like a capital "I").  When
> the screen is in this frozen mode, and I hit "Alt-Tab" (to switch from
> mythfrontend to xterm), and I mouse over to where I know the terminal
> is, I see the cursor shape change.  So it's almost as if X is
> functioning correctly, just not updating the display.  I also don't
> see any errors in myth's log or in the Xorg log, so that also suggests
> to me that the driver/hardware "thinks" everything is OK.
>
> Anyone seen anything like this?  Any thoughts on how to fix it?
>
> I've seen similar behavior with my Sandy Bridge i3-2120T with Gentoo.
However, I use xscreensaver to show a slideshow of photos and it will
freeze the last photo displayed. The occurrence is more like once every day
or two, not as frequently as yours. My impression was that it was a problem
with xscreensaver because it seemed to start happening after an update of
that package (just a guess/feeling). If I hit a few exit-type buttons on
the remote (I have one mapped to a script which will kill -9 mythfrontend)
including the End button to exit MythWelcome, it will eventually (10
seconds?) exit the X server and then my loop in .bash_profile will restart
X and then mythfrontend. It may be a bug with the xf86-video-intel driver,
because on the Bay Trail frontend I just built I encountered an apparent
driver bug triggered which crashed X when MythFrontend started. I solved
that by upgrading to the xf86-video-intel version 2.99.916. On my main
frontend (the Sandy Bridge) I recently downgraded xscreensaver and am
waiting to see if that fixes it (but even if it does it doesn't rule out a
driver bug). Similar to you, I haven't seen any errors in any of the logs
around the time the freeze seems to happen.

Karl
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