Today's Zypper dup to kernel 5.12 breaks several things

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Grub screen is fine, but when when the console screen switches modes from text there is a (headache inducing) shimmer - like a broken refresh rate?

Also on the login screen

On the login screen (XFCE4) the options to Shutdown or Restart are greyed out, also after logging in. You need to shutdown or restart from a terminal

Reverting to kernel 5.11 fixes the screen shimmer, but the Shutdown or Restart are still not available

This is a Lenovo Laptop with an Intel IGD

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 5500 (rev 09)

(Which might explain the video shimmer, but not Shutdown or Logout being unavailable via the gui)

I’m assuming the video shimmer is nothing to do with XFCE4 as it starts before Xorg is loaded

Have done nothing so far to investigate, as I’ve only did the

sudo zypper dup

ten minutes ago

Will investigate further

2

Although after a reboot, back to kernel 5.11.16-1-default , then back to 5.12, the Restart and Shutdown do appear to be available now…

perhaps there was a background task running that needed to complete first?

I noticed when it was restarting after the first time it stopped for a minute or two to “purge old kernels”

?

3

The screen shimmer starts at the point where it switches to Plymouth during boot

at a guess it’s the intel frame buffer

    5.102148] fb0: switching to inteldrmfb from EFI VGA

Or possibly related to

    3.393515] systemd[1]: /usr/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-start.service:15: Unit configured to use KillMode=none. This is unsafe, as it disables systemd's process lifecycle management for the service. Please update your service to use a safer KillMode=, such as 'mixed' or 'control-group'. Support for KillMode=none is deprecated and will eventually be removed.

   13.317658] systemd[1]: /usr/lib/systemd/system/plymouth-start.service:15: Unit configured to use KillMode=none. This is unsafe, as it disables systemd's process lifecycle management for the service. Please update your service to use a safer KillMode=, such as 'mixed' or 'control-group'. Support for KillMode=none is deprecated and will eventually be removed.

Just going to reboot into kernel 5.11 to see if those last two messages are there, too

4

Yep, the warnings about Plymouth are there in after booting kernel-5.11 too

So the Intel Frame buffer looks to be the issue

(And yes it does look as though the zypper purge kernels was preventing the Shutdown and Restart from being available, as that took a while after the first reboot after the zupper dup)

Back later

5

This can be fixed by turning off i915 modesetting

Edit

/etc/default/grub

and add i915.modeset=0 as below

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i915.modeset=0"

Then update grub by running

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Then reboot into kernel 5.12.0-1-default

6

This fixes things if you are only interested in doing things that place no demand on the video subsystem, but if you want to watch a youtube video, or play a simple game like Extreme Tux Racer or Armagetron, then your frame rate is pretty grotty, and your get screen tearing

So, I’m reverting to removing i915.modeset=0 and going back to kernel 5.11.16-default

(Just got to sort out grub so it does “saved default” and doesn’t stop with a warning about sparse files not being found (or something like that)

(I’ll start another thread about that a bit later)

7

I have the same issue on a Dell 5540. There is now a bug opened on bugzilla for openSUSE Tumbleweed.

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1185601

8

Thanks for pointing that out - that’s quite interesting

I hadn’t tried with an external monitor, but I will give that a go at work later this morning

I’m not getting a black / blank display when the gui starts, just one that does a (sort of) out of focus shimmer
I had previously removed all the things like “quiet splash” from /etc/default/grub so I always get to see the switch to framebuffer as the OS starts up, as I like to see whether anything has failed to start during the boot process, so I do that by default as soon as I install a new OS anyway.

So this - for me - is pretty definitely a i915 framebuffer issue with kernel 5.12

I’ve fixed it so I boot automatically in 5.11-16 and also set /etc/zypp/zypp.conf to keep several of the old kernels as I don’t want to lose the 5.11-16 kernel until this bug is fixed