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I recently connected my (a littler bit older) notebook to 2 external screens, so i can work properly from home. But for some unknown reason the system acts super weird.

Every 10 secods (Ubuntu 16.04 / 4.15.0-34) the system would hang/freeze for about 1-2 seconds. Keyboard input will not show on screen, mouse will not move but the input is shown after the freezing. So its display related i guess.

Some background: My notebook has hdm, vga and the internal screen of course. The connectors on the notebook are positioned to close to operate both hdmi and vga at the same time, so i modified a vga cable to be able to plug in both connectors at the same time. After playing around with the display settings i managed to turn off the built in display and turn on both external displays.

But now this problem occurs.

When i look at the syslog everytime theeffect system freezes i get a bunch of lines there:

Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.783013] [drm] enabling PCIE gen 2 link speeds, disable with radeon.pcie_gen2=0
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.789311] [drm] PCIE GART of 1024M enabled (table at 0x0000000000162000).
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.789407] radeon 0000:01:00.0: WB enabled
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.789410] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fence driver on ring 0 use gpu addr 0x0000000080000c00 and cpu addr 0x00000000f428120b
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.789413] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fence driver on ring 3 use gpu addr 0x0000000080000c0c and cpu addr 0x0000000088ef3a9f
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.790161] radeon 0000:01:00.0: fence driver on ring 5 use gpu addr 0x0000000000072118 and cpu addr 0x00000000ac605272
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.806483] [drm] ring test on 0 succeeded in 2 usecs
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.806495] [drm] ring test on 3 succeeded in 8 usecs
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.982411] [drm] ring test on 5 succeeded in 2 usecs
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.982420] [drm] UVD initialized successfully.
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.982568] [drm] ib test on ring 0 succeeded in 0 usecs
Oct  2 09:41:58 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1446.982710] [drm] ib test on ring 3 succeeded in 0 usecs
Oct  2 09:41:59 notebook-asusi7 kernel: [ 1447.653854] [drm] ib test on ring 5 succeeded

I am confused about the "disable with radeon.pcie_gen2=0" part - as far as i know there is no ati/amd chipset built in this machine. Could this be the problem?

Its one of those times where you simply want to work but ubuntu wants to get extra attention i can not afford. Please help me fix this weird problem.

Hardware specs:

  • ASUS Notebook (K53SK)
  • Intel i7 2670qm @ 2.20GHz
  • 16GByte DDR3 1600
  • No dedicated gpu, so the igpu from 2nd gen i7
  • 256GByte SSD

I bought the notebook second hand and noticed it has a bad battery. If i remove the power connector it will freeze after some minutes. I did not get a original asus psu with the notebook but some third party replacement. I think it could actually be possible the battery causes the issue but i doubt it since it worked well with the internal screen.

I turned off all power saving options but it had no effect.

UPDATE:

It seems there is a dedicated gpu:

root@notebook-asusi7:~# lshw -c display
*-display               
    Beschreibung: VGA compatible controller
    Produkt: Whistler LE [Radeon HD 6610M/7610M]
    Hersteller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
    Physische ID: 0
    Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:01:00.0
    Version: 00
    Breite: 64 bits
    Takt: 33MHz
    Fähigkeiten: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
    Konfiguration: driver=radeon latency=0
    Ressourcen: irq:40 memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:dfc20000-dfc3ffff ioport:d000(Größe=256) memory:dfc00000-dfc1ffff
*-display
    Beschreibung: VGA compatible controller
    Produkt: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller
    Hersteller: Intel Corporation
    Physische ID: 2
    Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:00:02.0
    Version: 09
    Breite: 64 bits
    Takt: 33MHz
    Fähigkeiten: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
    Konfiguration: driver=i915 latency=0
    Ressourcen: irq:39 memory:dd000000-dd3fffff memory:b0000000-bfffffff ioport:e000(Größe=64) memory:c0000-dffff
Philipp Wrann
  • 249

1 Answers1

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In my case the problem could be solved by turning off the radeon power management

https://blog.laplante.io/2014/07/disable-radeon-power-management-newer-linux-kernels/

Here the relevant part

  • Add the parameter radeon.runpm=0 to the Linux kernel boot parameters by editing /etc/default/grub. This is accomplished by appending the parameter to the value of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. After doing so, that line in my grub file looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.runpm=0"
  • Run sudo update-grub
  • Reboot your computer.
Philipp Wrann
  • 249