System hang with black screen & iwlwifi WRT: Invalid buffer destination errors

I got openSUSE Tumbleweed installed, updated, and running. I thought everything was working, so I took a little break and came onto this other box to create an account on this forum. While doing so, openSUSE timed out due to inactivity (expected), but now is stuck with a black screen containing 2 error messages. Each error message is of the form:

[ ####.######][T#####] iwlwifi 0000:00:14.3: WRT: Invalid buffer destination

I can provide the actual numbers, if they are helpful (the font is tiny, so they aren’t easy to read).

I just gave up on Fedora KDE Plasma due to many Wayland crashes, and decided to give openSUSE GNOME a try, hoping for a better outcome. Is there a way to fix the above issue, or should I give up and try a different distro (or even, yikes, consider Windows… I can’t believe I’m even having that thought)?

Can you still login to a virtual console?
Ctrl+Alt+F4 (for instance), then enter your username (or “root”) and password…

Yes, I can still access a virtual console.

@suseisontheloose … I assume you’re using GNOME running on Wayland??

If yes, log out, then select X11 + GNOME, (i.e., do not use Wayland). Execute some simple app, then Exit the app.

Now let the machine sit until it times out - so do you still see the same black screen with Wifi error??

BTW, you didn’t mention what is supposed to happen at time-out … lock screen? goes to Sleep? goes to Hibernate?

You also didn’t mention how you “fixed” the black screen … reboot? Forced power-down? Ctrl-Alt-F1 for a console then restart GNOME desktop?

There’s a remote possibility that you’re seeing two different issues simultaneously.
.
( Sidenote: we gave up on using Wayland on our TW machines, because of unreliability (not everyone has issues), and only use X11. (We also, eventually, switched all the TW machines to Leap 15.6) ).

Thanks. I gave up on Wayland too, so I’m actually using GNOME with X11.

The virtual console didn’t accept poweroff, so I wound up using REISUB to get out.

I then booted up and went into Tumbleweed (TW) with GNOME X11 again. This time, I disabled all GNOME extensions just to ensure one of the few extensions that was installed wasn’t causing an issue. I then played a few games of Swell Foop (included with openSUSE TW GNOME). After playing 4-5 games, the system would start to lag and Swell Foop would crash (no message, and nothing notable in the GUI log viewer). The system is very fast with plenty of RAM and a big SSD, so any lagging under light load is likely indicative of a problem.

I launched Swell Foop again. I could play 3-5 more games, and the same thing would happen. The only other user apps running were openSUSE’s welcome app and System Monitor. In System Monitor, I could see a bit of a CPU spike right before each Swell Foop app crash. Also, btrfs processes were a bit active at that time.

On note, when Swell Foop crashed, the content of the window of openSUSE’s welcome app turned to all white. The window frame remained, but it’s content was gone. To me, that implies the compositing window manager likely crashed.

The system has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 card as well as Intel integrated graphics (Raptor Lake). The proprietary NVIDIA drivers were installed via YaST. Without the proprietary drivers, nothing would appear on the external monitor except a cursor when using X11. When using Wayland, crashes would occur so frequently it was simply unusable.

I never imagined it would take this much time and work to get Linux up and running. I’ve already spent well over 40 hours on this process and I can’t believe I’m actually contemplating Windows. That makes me sad because I strongly prefer Linux for many, many reasons.

Seems likely that you met with some problem in the power save / sleep of the Nvidia card. There are boot options that can mitigate or avoid that, maybe @malcolmlewis can chime in to help here.
If you can force use of the integrated GPU and test screenlock/sleep/resume you may be able to confirm the above (just for testing, I understand that you need to run the whole Gnome on Nvidia to get the performance you need).

BTW, no problem on Gnome/Wayland here on Intel Haswell, so I cannot reproduce your problem, sorry.

Possibly related thread: https://forums.opensuse.org/t/gpu-drivers-didnt-seem-to-work-rtx-4070/174461
Possibly interesting reading: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/550.107.02/README/powermanagement.html

It should work fine with the Intel GPU and switcherooctl for Nvidia access.

The Grub options need to be fbdev=1 nosimplefb=1 for using the Intel GPU.

One of the biggest issues is clean up if the likes of suse-prime, bumblebee and bbswitch stuff being automatically installed and removing the artifacts along with rebuilding initrd.

I had no problems running my Quadro T400 on Wayland, likewise at present I have Intel ARC with the T400 as Prime Render Offload on my Desktop.

Thanks. Why do you think it’s a GPU driver issue, given the error seems to point to Wi-Fi? Or am I misinterpreting it?

You just went above my head. Can you elaborate? Thanks.

@suseisontheloose With multiple (optimus/hybrid technology) GPU’s, openSUSE installs a package called suse-prime and depending on the system age the likes of bumblebee/bbswitch to control the power aspects.

All fine for older hardware, not so much with newer hardware.

Then some Manufacturers use the devices external HDMI/DP/VGA on the secondary card to drive an external monitor, some don’t, so that creates more issues, like users indicating they cannot get an external monitor running.

The suse-prime setup is more for X11 not Wayland, it does have prime render offload feature, but again AFAIK oriented towards X11 rather than Wayland.

The bumblebee installation can leave old kernel module config files behind that stops things working as well, black screens (as you indicated).

There is switcherooctl to overcome this, a dbus application which IMHO works better as there is no configuration required and it is integrated in the GNOME desktop (right click and icon to launch with discrete card).

I don’t have any Xorg config when running X11, also nothing is needed for Wayland these days on GNOME.

A black screen is always graphics related, the wifi (iwlwifi) issue is something additional, likely firmware issues, there have been some recently, first thing to do is get the desktop system running.

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