Black Screen Occasionally on Boot and Wake from Suspend

AmsterDan

Not the first time someone has come forward with similar issues; reason for posting under 'off-topic' is because I'm not sure if this has anything to do with Solus in the first place. The issue has been around ever since I build this PC.

The issue I am having is that occasionally I get presented with a black (dead) screen either after pressing the power button on my computer or when the system is (attempting) to return from suspend mode. When I leave the computer in this 'dead' state for longer than roughly five seconds, the fans slowly (and from the sound of it linearly) start to ramp up to full speed. This can also happen when I reboot the system. To get out of this state I would force shutdown by holding the power button. Then I try again and hope for the best.

This entire ordeal happens about 75% of the time - if I had to give it a number.

I have tried turning on and off the monitor. Disconnect and re-connect the monitor. Moving the mouse (more). Tapping keys on the keyboard - more like keyboard smashing on random areas of my desk after the millionth time this happens.

I have changed the BIOS settings:

From 'auto' to actual PCIe generation of GPU.
Integrated graphics disabled. (In the hope it would force all signals through GPU).

Before I dump unnecessarily information out here, please help me out by pointing out some possible culprits; if that means you need some specs or feedback from this system, please let me know how to get it as this is a new endeavour to me.

Thanks in advance!

Harvey

Sleep states are a PITA. For some they work great and for others they are a constant nightmare. Every bit of hardware connected to your PC needs to support the sleep state properly or it may fail to suspend/hibernate or resume. It may even work 90% of the time but fail to resume sometimes when no changes have been made to the system.

For me a simple USB dongle prevented suspend working. Then you have every kernel / driver / firmware update which has the potential to break compatibility assuming it worked properly in the first place. Ultimately I got fed up of this nonsense and stopped using suspend/hibernate. It has never been reliable for me on any system I have ever owned even on Windows.

Then there are issues caused by multibooting. Windows by default does not actually shutdown systems but puts them into a sleep state in order to boot faster. This often results in some hardware, usually networking/bluetooth not working and/or breaking suspend/resume in Linux until a hard power-off has occurred. Multibooting with other Linux distributions can cause issues too.

Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) is/was/always will be a nightmare. Microsoft has a hardware certification lab for this sort of stuff and its still useless. They can only test that configuration with the drivers available at the time. Someone buys a system that is certified, plugs in a web cam or updates and 💥

Which is to say these are some of the most annoying things to figure out and may have no known solution. Sorry but shared frustration is all I can offer you.

brent

Harvey Ultimately I got fed up of this nonsense and stopped using suspend/hibernate. It has never been reliable for me on any system I have ever owned even on Windows.

I have devoted my digital life to the NEVER button in any configuration of power/display, never looked back, and have been headache-free. And have never noticed pixel degradation or any of the myths you hear about having your screen on too long.
Good explanation of all the moving parts here with and without Win factored in. I always thought success with wake/sleep depended on proper moon-star alignment and you confirmed.

Solarmass

Harvey Ultimately I got fed up of this nonsense and stopped using suspend/hibernate.

This is the way!

WetGeek

Harvey Ultimately I got fed up of this nonsense and stopped using suspend/hibernate.

Harvey, I've heard of "suspend," but to my knowledge I've never used it - unless there's a different name for it. I DO use hibernate, however, with every distro - including every Solus DE - whether on hardware or on a VM. Never have I had any problems with it. All my computers - except my torrent server - hibernate every night. And all my VMs hibernate whenever I'm not actively using them.

Would you please provide a description of "suspend," so that I can figure out how it differs from "hibernate"?

AmsterDan

Ok, so definitely not the only one. I have already disabled suspend; however, any experience in this issue being present when simply wanting to start up my computer? I had hoped, by mentioning this, that it would eliminate or give rise to some other clues for a dead screen.

Will be playing with some more BIOS settings in the meanwhile; keep suggestions coming though! Still (hopelessly) trying to figure out something.

Axios

AmsterDan To many variables so many things could be the issue.
Some computers would do the fan bit at start when there were hardware issues.
I would do a good heavy duty ram test.

https://www.memtest86.com/

Staudey

WetGeek This should provide a short overview: https://askubuntu.com/a/655723

brent

WetGeek hibernate has also worked for me everywhere I tried it. maybe it differs from suspend in that suspend is a temporary state? to me hibernate is an end-of-day permanent state. Every time I use it I think it's another version of shutdown. blue monitor light turns to amber. no fans running. system is electrically off--mostly. I have to power it up with the physical On button then log in again--identical to a fresh boot. I think suspend is more "I have to run a quick errand" type of command.
guessing

WetGeek

brent hibernate has also worked for me everywhere I tried it. maybe it differs from suspend in that suspend is a temporary state?

See Staudey's reply, right above yours. I use hibernate daily, so I'm very familiar with it. But I wasn't sure about sleep and suspend. Turns out that neither of those actually turns a computer off, as hibernate does. But I won't repeat what Staudy provided. It's a brief description of the differences.

Harvey

suspend keeps key components such as RAM powered.

hibernate dumps the contents of RAM to disk. This is why swap must be larger than your total available RAM in order for hibernate to work. Removing the need to supply power to RAM while in this sleep state. Hibernation is still considered a sleep state, sleep is just the all encompassing term and covers more than just suspend and hibernate.

Theoretically hibernating is safer as it has a saved restore point. In reality you should not trust either of them and instead save your work such as open documents etc before stepping away from the PC.

AmsterDan

Thank you. As a follow up, I have made one change in the BIOS and that is enabling 'auto boost' for memory. I find it hard to believe that did anything, but the system comes out of suspend flawlessly and has been booting with display ever since.

*** Latest and final update on the issue today (March 12, 2024): ***

The issue was intermittently persistent after all. The real issue was an incompatible riser card for my GPU. PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0 which I wrote more about in this post.