Hello,
I had two serious problems when installing openSUSE Leap 15.4 on my PC
(relatively recent, Dec. 2022). Solving these problems took me a considerable
amount of time and research and many dozens of test boots, configuration
experiments, test hibernate/wake-ups etc. once in a while spread over more
than one year.
In case that I am not the only one having these troubles with a PC like mine,
I want to describe the problems and the solutions I found eventually, so that
others can possibly profit from the time I invested.
None of these problems occur with Windows 11 on the same PC.
My system is:
OS: openSUSE Leap 15.4
Kernel: 5.14.21-150400.24.100-default
CPU: i5-12400 with UHD 730
Mainboard: MSI PRO B660M-A DDR4
Problem 1: Pixel distortion.
Problem description:
-
Some GUI elements (menus, text input fields, icons) are covered by
irregular short stripes of white pixels and are reacting slowly to user
interactions. -
Moving the affected window or using scroll bar may correct the rendering
temporarily.
Affected session types/Window managers.
- Occurring with: Fluxbox 1.3.7, IceWM 1.4.2
- Not occurring with session types:
GNOME, Gnome Classic, Gnome Xorg, Plasma (X11), Xfce4
Affected application programs I tried.
- Occurring with: yast2, texworks, firefox, k3b, kolourpaint
- Not occurring with: xterm, emacs, evince
A solution I found for my system that solves this problem for my computer:
- Create file 20-intel.conf in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d with content:
Section “Device”
Identifier “Intel Graphics”
Driver “modesetting”
Option “TearFree” “true”
Option “AccelMethod” “uxa”
EndSection
Problem 2: Freezes at boot and waking-up from hibernate.
Problem description:
-
Computer freezes at different points in time at every 5th to 7th boot or
at waking up from hibernate: some times with black screen even before the
Grub2 menu appears, some times while Grub2 counts down seconds to boot,
some times while recreating system from hibernate but never later. When
the system was up and running, it did not freeze.When the freeze occurred, “Reset”-button or pressing the “Power”-button on
the PC case helped. Sometimes, 3 or even 4 trials were necessary for a
boot or wake-up from hibernate without freeze. Eventually, it was
possible to boot or wake-up without data loss. -
In case booting or waking up from hibernate has been finished
successfully, the computer ran without freezing until shutdown or
hibernate. -
High CPU load before hibernate increased the probability of a freeze later
at waking up.
A solution I found for my system that solves this problem for my computer:
(1) In the BIOS-setup there is some setting named something like “initial
graphic adapter”. In my computer, it was set to PEG from the beginning,
even though I have no separate graphics card but am using the integrated
graphics of the i5-12400. Switching this setting from PEG to IGD made the
freezes disappear finally.
Before step (1), I also did the following (including grub2-mkconfig etc., of
course):
(2) In file /etc/default/grub:
Change GRUB_TERMINAL=“gfxterm” to GRUB_TERMINAL=“console”.
(3) In file /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“… intel_idle.max_cstate=0”
(4) In file /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“… intel_idle.max_cstate=1”
I do not know whether (2), (3) and/or (4) are necessary. The freezes
disappeared after step (1).