screen energy saving stopped

[Duncan]

Marcelo Magno T. Sales posted on Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:22:32 -0300 as
excerpted:

> I'm facing the same problem in Kubuntu 14.04 with KDE 4.14.13, the 
screen
> saver and energy saving both stopped working a few weeks ago. I can 
still
> turn off the monitors manually, using xset dpms force off. I can also 
start
> the screen saver manually, but neither one work automatically anymore.
> Tried:
> 
> xset s on
> xset +dpms
> xset dpms 0 0 3600
> 
> No luck. Eventually the screen saver and energy saving start working
> automatically again out of nothing, but soon they stop working again. If
> you find a solution, please post here.

You're better than I'm seeing here...

Gentoo ~amd64 with kde frameworks5/plasma5 from git, kernel 4.6.0 and now 
4.7-rc7, radeon "turks" graphics (hd6670, IIRC) with the native X/kernel/
mesa drivers, triple monitor, two of which are actually TVs used as 
monitors.

About a month ago the system started _crashing_ (!!) if I left it idle 
long enough to power-down the monitors.

With a bit of experimentation I found I can set ...

xset -dpms

... so they don't power down on their own, and just turn off the monitors 
(yes, all three, one at a time) manually if I want to.  KDE/plasma's 
screen locker still kicks in fine, and I can unlock and continue.

If I leave dpms on, after the screen blanks I can still catch it and 
continue, as long as the monitors haven't fully shut off yet.

And as I mentioned, I can turn the monitors off manually, no crashing as 
long as I don't have dpms on and let them turn off automatically.

But if I leave dpms on and let them power down automatically, crash!  The 
kernel dies, tho sometimes it stays just enough alive so magic-SRQ-B 
(reboot) works, but the other magic-SRQ sequences don't respond and 
sometimes B doesn't either, and I have to hardware reset.

Regardless, if I don't actually power-down the system, on reboot it fails 
to detect the SSDs properly and won't reboot properly as a result.  I 
have to actually power-down the system, leave it off several seconds, 
then power it back on, in ordered to get both the SSDs and the spinning 
rust to properly detect.


As a result I suspect it's something to do with an xorg/mesa/kernel 
update that happened about then, since the problem seems to be a graphics 
driver not resetting properly on monitor auto-off, triggering both the 
crash and the storage device detection failure on reboot, unless I've 
actually powered down the system for a few seconds to full-hardware-reset.


Again, I can xset -dpms and power down the monitors manually, and I'm 
fine.  But if I let them auto-powerdown, hard crash!

Which is definitely worse than having them simply fail to auto-powerdown 
at all, the symptom you two are reporting.

But it could well be related.  And if so, it's gotta be a kernel/X/mesa 
update that we've all gotten triggering the problem, since I'm seeing 
this on gentoo with plasma5, and you're seeing the dpms failures on 
fedora and ubuntu with kde4.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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